However, here we are, and here I expect we shall remain for, say, a week. The horses are all right out in the open. The men are in barns. But we are in cottages—real, almost English-looking cottages. Edward and I share a room in one, and the others are dotted about the village. Now, this is the cottage:
From the high street (the only street) you turn into a little gate, and then walk down a path of brick with a narrow flower border on either side, and vegetables beyond. The cottage is white, with lace curtains and brick floors, without carpets, like all French cottages. The walls have endless pictures of saints and things, with occasional crucifixes and school certificates and faded photographs of people in stiff dresses and crimped hair.
Out at the back more kitchen-garden with some fruit-trees.
Altogether quite a charming little place. Dusty and rather flat open country intersected by deepish valleys, not unlike the Cirencester road if you removed all the woods, or nearly all. We don't, of course, know what we are going to do now.
July 23.
Things is curiouser and curiouser. In all haste we got ready to move. We then moved like tortoises. I rode over to —— yesterday. Cavalry all over the place like locusts. And, lawks! what a din! Guns in a violent paroxysm of rage. Aeroplanes wandering about in the sky, purring like angry panthers, all yellow in the sunlight. And all day and night more dusty men and dusty horses and dusty lorries and dusty guns coming and going, coming and going.
The other squadron at last quite close to us. Long talks with Dennis. He's had an exciting time, and was under orders for a most hair-raising job, which didn't come off owing to Fritz's tiresome habit of doing the unexpected. Horrors! The General has been trying Swallow. I fear he may steal him. Of course he has every right to any horse in the regiment, but it is quite difficult to smile. Swallow is, unfortunately, even more showy than Rinaldo was; but he shied at a goat, bless him, and I think that may just turn the scale. I shall now proceed to train Swallow to shy at every blade of grass, every grain of sand. Long live that goat! We are still "standing by." It is a wearing existence. I bathed yesterday in a well-known river. So beautiful and willowy.
July 28.
A BATH
Temperature 100,000°! And I am lying on a bed in a wee cottage, very, very dusty and dirty. Hale, however, is going to bring some water from the pump, and, oh Jerusalem, won't it be heavenly—a bath! All these things off, and lovely clean things on, and lovely coffee to drink when that's done. I wouldn't change the prospects of the next half-hour for all the pearls and peacocks of Araby—no, not if you offered me the Peace of Europe! Europe be blowed! I want my bath.