"We're always in it when there's a row on," said Bubb. "It's no sooner see and like a place 'ere than you're out't next day. There are some fine birds in this 'ere place too.... Look there are the cooks gettin' dinner ready. Gawd they're sweatin' at the job too."
A field kitchen stood in the church square and the smoke curled up from the sooty funnel and paled away in the clear air. Here the company cooks were busy preparing dinner. Facing the Canal was a row of red-roofed houses, with a wealth of summer flowers round the doors, the windows looked out coquettishly through roses, and green ivy clambered up the walls.
To the left of the church was a snug little graveyard hidden in a spinney, and here a number of English soldiers were buried. Under a large tree stood a broken and rusty pump which was out of action. A large shell had fallen there and after the explosion some soldiers found a robin, dead. They buried it and were moved to poetry in inscribing the little bird's epitaph. The epitaph, written in large black letters, hung from the handle of the pump. This was the verse:—
"Cock Robin lies beside this pump,
A coal-box hit him such a thump,
And this is all we've got to tell,
We'll lick the swine that fired the shell."
Bubb looked at the epitaph.
"Mind the one over Sergeant Slade at Maroc?" he remarked.
"'Ere lies the remains of Sergeant Slade,
As was slow at frowin' a 'and grenade."
"Not as good as the one at the Cabaret Rouge up at Souchez," said Flanagan, and quoted:—
"This marks the fallen dug-out
Where seven heroes fell,
Strafed in a bomb-proof shelter
By a high velocity shell."