And Judsi:
"We'll be sleepin' in their bloomin' country, to-morrow."
Some of the men may have believed it. I thought it only right to moderate the enthusiasm.
"Oh Metz! We haven't got there yet. The siege is sure to be ghastly!"
The lieutenant who was passing, chaffed me:
"Dreher, as pessimistic as usual? He'll never believe we're getting on, until he's in Berlin."
We went into quarters at Buxy. Shortly after midnight there was an alarm. The artillery which we had not heard for some days was talking again. As old stagers we had missed the noise, it cheered us up.
But we grumbled when, having been called up and paraded in the Church Square, we were kept hanging about and freezing for an hour or more. The men "groused," and wanted to know why they couldn't be left to sleep in peace.
A lot of them wanted to "get down to it" again, and we had hard work to prevent them. A certain number sloped off in the dark. Each platoon lost a few who never turned up again.