Seven to seven-thirty p.m. is generally rather a busy time. Official correspondence, usually marked "secret" and nearly always "urgent," is apt to arrive, and it is at this time that the intricate report on the day's shooting has to be made out and despatched to Group Headquarters. I am in the midst of this, working against time, with an orderly waiting in the kitchen, when the door is flung open and the Child enters with a cheery "Good evening, Master."
The Child calls me Master sometimes because I am always threatening to send his parents a half-term report on his progress and general conduct, or to put him back into Eton collars! He has now just returned from forty-eight hours' duty at the O.P. and presents an appearance such that his own mother would hardly recognise him. He wears a cap of a particularly floppy kind which he refers to as "my gorblimy hat," an imperfectly cured goatskin coat of varied hues which smells abominably, fur gauntlets, brown breeches, and indiarubber thigh boots. Round his person are slung field glasses, a prismatic compass, an empty haversack, and a gas helmet. Moreover, he is caked with mud from head to foot and flushed with his two-mile walk against the cold wind. For this is still March, and we have had frost and snow and thaw alternately this last week.
"Anything happen after I left?" I ask. I had been up at the O.P. in the morning, and we'd "done a little shoot" together.
"Nothing much. The Hun got a bit busy with rifle grenades about lunch time and started to put some small 'minnies'[7] into our second line. So I retaliated on three different targets, which stopped him p.d.q. Later on he put a few pip-squeaks round our O.P. and one four-two into the church. That's about all, 'cept that I had to dodge a blasted machine-gun when I was leaving at dusk—one of those 250-rounds-a-minute stunts, you know—and I had to nip across that open bit, in between his bursts of fire. The trenches are in Hell's own mess after this thaw—I went down to the front line with an infantry officer to look at a sniper's post he's located; we might get the 'hows'[8] on to it. Any letters for me?"
[7] Minenwer, i.e. trench mortar bombs.
[8] Howitzers.
I push them across to him, but forbid him to remain in the room with that smelly coat on.
"Righto," he grins; "I'm off to have a bath and a shave before dinner."
"But, my dear Child," I say, "you shaved last week! Surely——"
He grins again and saunters gracefully out. The Child is always graceful even when wearing a goatskin coat and ungainly thigh boots. But he's tired—I can see it in his eyes. His last two days have been spent as follows: At seven p.m. the night before last he arrived, in the capacity of liaison officer, at the headquarters of the battalion that we are supporting. He dined there and slept, in his clothes of course and always at the menace of a telephone, in a draughty hovel next door. Before dawn the next morning he was groping his way along three-quarters of a mile of muddy communication trench to the O.P. Arrived there it is his business to make certain that the telephonists below in the dank cellar are "through" on every line. Then he ascends the ladder of the observation tower and stares through the loophole at the mists which swathe the trenches in front of him. And there, alternately with the subaltern of the other battery which uses this particular O.P., he must remain until it is again too dark to shoot.