“No fear, miss,” said Lance-Corporal Bates; “I’m all right.”
Lance-Corporal Bates had three gold bars on the sleeve of his tunic. He might fairly be reckoned a man of courage. His position, when Miss Willmot spoke to him, demanded nerve. He stood on the top rail of the back of a chair, a feeble-looking chair. The chair was placed on a table which was inclined to wobble, because one of its legs was half an inch shorter than the other three. Sergeant O’Rorke, leaning on the table, rested most of his weight on the seat of the chair, thereby balancing Bates and preventing an upset. Miss Willmot sat on the corner of the table, so that it wobbled very little. Bates, perilously balanced, hammered a nail, the last necessary nail, into the wall through the topmost ray of a large white star. Then he crept cautiously down.
Standing beside Miss Willmot he surveyed the star.
“Looks a bit like Christmas, don’t it, miss?” he said.
“The glitters on it,” said Sergeant O’Rorke, “is the beautifullest that ever was seen. The diamonds on the King’s Crown wouldn’t be finer.”
The star hung on the wall of the canteen opposite the counter. It was made of cotton wool pasted on cardboard. The wool had been supplied by a sympathetic nurse from a neighbouring hospital. It was looted from the medical stores. The frosting, which excited Sergeant O’Rorke’s admiration, was done with sugar. It was Miss Nelly Davis, youngest and merriest of Miss Willmot’s helpers, who suggested the sugar, when the powdered glass ordered from England failed to arrive.
“There can’t be any harm in using it,” she said. “What we’re getting now isn’t sugar at all, it is fine gravel. A stone of it wouldn’t sweeten a single urn of tea.”
Miss Willmot took the sugar from her stores as she accepted the looted cotton-wool, without troubling to search for excuse or justification. She was a lady of strong will. When she made up her mind that the Christmas decorations of her canteen were to be the best in France she was not likely to stick at trifling breaches of regulations.
She looked round her with an expression of justifiable satisfaction. The long hut which served as a canteen looked wonderfully gay. Underneath the white star ran an inscription done in large letters made of ivy leaves. Miss Willmot, in the course of two years’ service in the canteen of a base camp, had gained some knowledge of the soldier’s heart Her inscription was calculated to make an immediate appeal. “A Merry Christmas,” it ran, “And the Next in Blighty.” The walls of the hut were hung round with festoons of coloured paper. Other festoons, red, blue, and green stretched across the room from wall to wall under the low ceiling. Chinese lanterns, swinging on wires, threatened the head of anyone more than six feet in height. Sergeant O’Rorke, an Irish Guardsman until a wound lamed him, now a member of the camp police force, had to dodge the Chinese lanterns when he walked about. Jam-pots and cigarette-tins, swathed in coloured paper, held bunches of holly and sprigs of mistletoe. They stood on the tables and the window sills.
But the counter was the crowning glory of the canteen. In the middle of it stood an enormous Christmas cake, sugar-covered, bedecked with flags. Round the cake, built into airy castles, were hundreds of crackers. Huge dishes, piled high with mince pies, stood in rows along the whole length of the counter on each side of the cake. Behind them, rising to the height of five steps, was a long staircase made of packets of cigarettes.