"I will," rejoined Penfold, depositing his rifle on a bench. "Have they left any grub?"
"Wish they had," was the grim answer. Then, with more eagerness than he had hitherto shown, he asked: "Have you any food? I haven't had a bite since this morning. Finished the whole of my ration, including jam, thinking that the fresh stuff would be in—but it isn't!"
"You're welcome to a share of ours, laddie," remarked Alderhame, "which happens to be nixes."
Ralph sat down on a bundle of straw, having first appropriated the late occupant's pack as a pillow. He was feeling horribly tired. His feet and hands were numbed with the cold. His saturated clothes were throwing off wisps of muggy vapour. Even a huge rat pattering on the muddy floor and scampering through the straw hardly troubled him, and a few hours previously he would have gone twenty yards to avoid one.
In his drowsiness he found himself contemplating the latest of his many new comrades.
"I'll bet that chap's a Jew," he thought.
Setley was right in his surmise. Sidney Bartlett was the grandson of a Polish refugee who had become a naturalized Englishman and, dropping the name of Bariniski, had successfully engaged in business in Birmingham. Like many of the Hebrew race, young Bartlett was a patriot and a staunch supporter of the land of his adoption. When the call to arms came he rallied to the Colours, only to be sent back until he was sufficiently old to serve in His Majesty's Forces. Only three years previously Sidney was at a large day school, and there occurred an incident that was to influence his conduct at the Somme Front.
For some weeks the lad was persistently absent from school. The head master constantly received notes to the effect that Sidney was kept at home through domestic troubles, in which a grandmother figured largely. The caligraphy arousing his suspicions, the head wrote to the lad's father, and then the "cat was out of the bag."
One afternoon Bartlett Senior, accompanied by his errant son, came to the head master's study.
"Now, Sidney," said his sire, solemnly, "I vant you to tell de trut'—de whole trut', mind. Later on, in bizness, Sidney, you may tell a lie; but now you must tell de trut'."