He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line; but the captain of his O.T.C., where he had been sergeant for nearly a year, headed him off and steered him directly to a commission in a battalion so new that half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was breeding meningitis through living over-crowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.
“But it’s in the family,” Michael laughed.
“You don’t mean to tell me that you believed that old story all this time?” said Helen. (Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.) “I gave you my word of honour—and I give it again—that—that it’s all right. It is indeed.”
“Oh, that doesn’t worry me. It never did,” he replied valiantly. “What I meant was, I should have got into the show earlier if I’d enlisted—like my grandfather.”
“Don’t talk like that! Are you afraid of it’s ending so soon, then?”
“No such luck. You know what K. says.”
“Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn’t possibly last beyond Christmas—for financial reasons.”
“’Hope he’s right, but our Colonel—and he’s a Regular—says it’s going to be a long job.”
Michael’s battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant several “leaves,” it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches on the Norfolk coast; thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks on a baseless rumour of distant service. But, the very day that Michael was to have met Helen for four whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to help make good the wastage of Loos, and he had only just time to send her a wire of farewell.
In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Finding that it had sound views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent Commander stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.