‘Keep away from that place,’ said I, ‘or you’ll find yourself in a field-kitchen.’
‘Not me!’ he crowed. ‘I’m as sacred as golf-courses.’
MECHANISM AND MECHANICS
There was a little town a couple of miles down the road where one used to lunch in the old days, and had the hotel to oneself. Now there are six ever-changing officers in billet there, and the astonished houses quiver all day to traction engines and high-piled lorries. A unit of the Army Service Corps and some mechanical transport lived near the station, and fed the troops for twenty miles around.
‘Are your people easy to find?’ I asked of a wandering private, with the hands of a sweep, the head of a Christian among lions, and suicide in his eye.
‘Well, the A.S.C. are in the Territorial Drill Hall for one thing; and for another you’re likely to hear us! There’s some motors come in from Bulford.’ He snorted and passed on, smelling of petrol.
The drill-shed was peace and comfort. The A.S.C. were getting ready there for pay-day and for a concert that evening. Outside in the wind and the occasional rain-spurts, life was different. The Bulford motors and some other crocks sat on a side-road between what had been the local garage and a newly-erected workshop of creaking scaffold-poles and bellying slatting rick-cloths, where a forge glowed and general repairs were being effected. Beneath the motors men lay on their backs and called their friends to pass them spanners, or, for pity’s sake, to shove another sack under their mud-wreathed heads.
A corporal, who had been nine years a fitter and seven in a city garage, briefly and briskly outlined the more virulent diseases that develop in Government rolling-stock. (I heard quite a lot about Bulford.) Hollow voices from beneath eviscerated gear-boxes confirmed him. We withdrew to the shelter of the rick-cloth workshop—that corporal; the sergeant who had been a carpenter, with a business of his own, and, incidentally, had served through the Boer War; another sergeant who was a member of the Master Builders’ Association; and a private who had also been fitter, chauffeur, and a few other things. The third sergeant, who kept a poultry-farm in Surrey, had some duty elsewhere.
A man at a carpenter’s bench was finishing a spoke for a newly-painted cart. He squinted along it.
‘That’s funny,’ said the master builder. ‘Of course in his own business he’d chuck his job sooner than do wood-work. But it’s all funny.’