‘I’ve bin in the Army for two years an’ I’m not goin’ to get out of a chanst o’ seein’ service, an’ don’t you try to make me do so. I’ll come back, Cris, an’ when I take on as a man I’ll marry you—marry you when I’m a Lance.’
‘Promise, Piggy?’
Lew reflected on the future as arranged by Jakin a short time previously, but Cris’s mouth was very near to his own.
‘I promise, s’elp me Gawd!’ said he.
Cris slid an arm round his neck.
‘I won’t ’old you back no more, Piggy. Go away an’ get your medal, an’ I’ll make you a new button-bag as nice as I know how,’ she whispered.
‘Put some o’ your ’air into it, Cris, an’ I’ll keep it in my pocket so long’s I’m alive.’
Then Cris wept anew, and the interview ended. Public feeling among the drummer-boys rose to fever pitch and the lives of Jakin and Lew became unenviable. Not only had they been permitted to enlist two years before the regulation boy’s age—fourteen—but, by virtue, it seemed, of their extreme youth, they were allowed to go to the Front—which thing had not happened to acting-drummers within the knowledge of boy. The Band which was to accompany the Regiment had been cut down to the regulation twenty men, the surplus returning to the ranks. Jakin and Lew were attached to the Band as supernumeraries, though they would much have preferred being Company buglers.
‘’Don’t matter much,’ said Jakin, after the medical inspection. ‘Be thankful that we’re ’lowed to go at all. The Doctor ’e said that if we could stand what we took from the Bazar-Sergeant’s son we’d stand pretty nigh anything.’
‘Which we will,’ said Lew, looking tenderly at the ragged and ill-made housewife that Cris had given him, with a lock of her hair worked into a sprawling ‘L’ upon the cover.