“If you followed your own advice, grandmother,” he said; “you being three inches taller, and six times more careless! I always told your father and Norah that you’d be an awful responsibility.”
“I’ll put you under arrest if you’re not civil,” Jim threatened. “Small boys aren’t allowed to be impertinent on active service!”
They floundered along in the mud, ducking whenever the parapet was low: sandbags had run short, and trench-repairing on the previous night had been like making bricks without straw. The men were finishing breakfast, keeping close to the dug-outs, since at any moment the first German shell might scream overhead. The line was very thin; reinforcements, badly enough wanted, were reported to be coming up. Meanwhile the battalion could only hope that the shells would continue to spare them, and that when the enemy came the numbers would be sufficiently even to enable them to put up a good fight.
Captain Anstruther, white-faced under a bandage that showed red stains, nodded to them cheerily.
“Ripping morning, isn’t it?” he said. “Hope you’ve had a pleasant night, Linton!”
Jim grinned, glancing at his hands, which displayed numerous long red scars.
“One’s nights here are first-class training for the career of a burglar later on,” he said. “Mending barbed-wire in the dark is full of unexpected happenings, chiefly unpleasant. I don’t mind the actual mending so much as having to lie flat on one’s face in the mud when a star-shell comes along.”
“Very disorganizing to work,” said another subaltern, Blake, whose mud-plastered uniform showed that he had had his share of lying flat. In private life Blake had belonged to the species “nut,” and had been wont to parade in Bond Street in beautiful raiment. Here, dirty, unshaven and scarcely distinguishable from the muddiest of his platoon, he permitted himself a cheerfulness that Bond Street had never seen.
“Sit down,” Anstruther said. “There are more or less dry sandbags, and business is slack. Why didn’t you fellows come down to mess? Have you had any breakfast?”
“Yes, thanks,” Jim answered. “We fed up there—our men were inclined to give breakfast a miss, so we encouraged them to eat by feeding largely, among them. Nothing like exciting a feeling of competition.”