"Malcolm Carr, by all that's blue and pink!"
This was the greeting hurled at Malcolm a few hours after his arrival in camp. At that time there were comparatively few troops at Codford. Heavy drafts had just been sent to Sling Camp, preparatory to proceeding to France, while the expected reinforcements had not yet put in an appearance. Yet one of the first men young Carr met that evening was a Christchurch acquaintance who lived but a few doors away from Malcolm's parents.
"By Jove, this is great, Tommy!" exclaimed Malcolm. "Never thought I'd run against you here. You know Selwyn, of course? This is Fortescue, one of the boys--and one of the best. An old Christchurch chum, Tommy Travers."
"When did you blow in?" enquired Travers, as the four made their way along a narrow plank gangway between the lines of huts--the only means of preventing men sinking above their ankles in mud.
"Arrived at Plymouth this morning," replied Malcolm. "And you? Been across yet?"
Travers touched his coat-sleeve, on which was a faded gold stripe.
"Yes," he answered; "five months of it. I got this buckshie in that scrap in Delville Wood, when our brigade captured Flers. Shrap," he added laconically. "It was hell let loose, and our boys copped it. Six weeks in hospital, and then I came here. Managed to get dropped when the last draft went to Sling, so I suppose I'll be off with the next crush. Any news Christchurch way?"
"Did you hear that my brother Peter is wounded and missing?" asked Malcolm, after a flow of conversation on strictly personal subjects.
"Yes," replied Travers. "He was sergeant of my platoon. I think I was one of the last of our chaps to see him. It was like this: our battalion cleared the southern portion of Delville Wood in grand style. We fairly put the wind up Fritz. Bombs and bayonets all the time. We had a lot of casualties, though. When we rushed our objective your brother Peter was senior non-com. There were two subalterns left, but they weren't fit for much. Both hit, but too plucky to chuck their hands in. Well, we began digging ourselves in on the edge of the wood when the Boches started to pump in high-explosive, shrap, and gas shells. There was precious little left of the wood. Not a leaf to be seen, and at most a crowd of charred tree-trunks, many of 'em still blazing."
"Why Fritz treated us to an extra special dose goodness only knows. The battalion lying on our right barely copped it at all, and the Tommy regiment on our left came off lightly until the Huns had finished with us. We had little or no cover. The ground was chock-full of big roots, and we hadn't time to remove them. The trees were flying in big and little chunks all over the show, and all the cover we could get were a few shell-holes."