A cheery voice interrupted us:
"Good evening, sir. Is this Caterpillar Farm?"
We both jumped, like detected conspirators.
In the doorway stood a subaltern, saluting, with the totem of the Royal Mid-Mudshire Regiment stencilled upon his tin bowler.
"Come in," I said. "This is the place you want. I presume you have come to take over?"
About midnight, the Orderly-room Staff filed through the ghostly streets of Albert, to the music of innumerable big guns working up to their final spasm. At their head marched a silent major and a preoccupied assistant adjutant.
Next morning, just after dawn, the Second Royal Covenanters went raging to the opening attack of the greatest battle yet fought in the history of warfare. We were led into action by our Commanding Officer, Eric Bethune.
CHAPTER XI
ENFIN!
If those years brought unprecedented misery to the human family, they had their compensating moments—especially for those most deeply concerned. Lovers, for instance—true lovers. When two people really love one another, and are limited by inexorable circumstances to rare and brief periods of companionship, each one of which may be the very last—and each succeeding day of those four years saw some six hundred British soldiers of all ranks go back from Leave never to return—their love is lifted to heights, and breathes an atmosphere, of which ordinary workaday lovers can know nothing. Poor peace-time lovers—sitting holding hands in a conservatory, or spooning on a golf course—what do they know? Faced by a future all their own (and the enervating consciousness that there will probably be a good deal of it), what do they know? What do they know of the blind rapture of Six Days' Leave?