Now that he came to look at it in proper perspective, it wasn’t at all a bad life. When had he been worried to death, as he was now? And there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according to legend, though, modestly, he would never own to it, seized two Boches by the neck and knocked their heads together till they died, and who, musically inclined, would sit at his, Doggie’s, feet while he played on his penny whistle all the sentimental tunes he had ever heard of; Sergeant Ballinghall, a tower of a man, a champion amateur heavy-weight boxer, with a voice compared with which a megaphone sounded like a maiden’s prayer, and a Bardolphian nose and an eagle eye and the heart of a broody hen, who had not only given him boxing lessons, but had pulled him through difficult places innumerable … and scores of others. He wondered what they were doing. He also was foolish enough to wonder whether they missed him, forgetting for the moment that if a regiment took seriously to missing their comrades sent to Kingdom Come or Blighty, they would be more like weeping willows than destroyers of Huns.
All the same, he knew that he would always live in the hearts of two or three of them, and the knowledge brought him considerable comfort. It was strange to realize how the tentacles of his being stretched out gropingly towards these (from the old Durdlebury point of view) impossible friends. They had grafted themselves on to his life. Or was that a correct way of putting it? Had they not, rather, all grafted themselves on to a common stock of life, so that the one common sap ran through all their veins?
It took him a long time to get this idea formulated, fixed and accepted. But Doggie was not one to boggle at the truth, as he saw it. And this was the truth. He, James Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, was a Tommy of the Tommies. He had lived the Tommy life intensely. He was living it now. And the extraordinary part of it was that he didn’t want to be anything else but a Tommy. From the social or gregarious point of view his life for the past year had been one of unclouded happiness. The realization of it, now that he was clearly sizing up the ramshackle thing which he called his existence, hit him like the butt-end of a rifle. Hardship, cold, hunger, fatigue, stench, rats, the dread of inefficiency—all these had been factors of misery which he could never eliminate from his soldier’s equation; but such free, joyous, intimate companionship with real human beings he had never enjoyed since he was born. He longed to be back among them, doing the same old weary, dreary, things, eating the same old Robinson Crusoe kind of food, crouching with them in the same old beastly hole in the ground, while the Boche let loose hell on the trench. Mo Shendish’s grin and his “’Ere, get in aht of the rain,” and his grip on his shoulder, dragging him a few inches farther into shelter, were a spiritual compensation transcending physical discomfitures and perils.
“It’s all dam funny,” he said half aloud.
But this was England, and although he was hedged about, protected and restricted by War Office Regulation Red Tape twisted round to the strength of steel cables, yet he was in command of telegraphs, of telephones, and, in a secondary degree, of the railway system of the United Kingdom.
He found himself deprecating the compulsory facilities of communication in the civilized world. The Deanery must be informed of his home-coming.
As soon as he could secure the services of a nurse he wrote out three telegrams: one addressed “Conover, The Deanery, Durdlebury”; one to Peddle at Denby Hall, and one to Jeanne. The one to Jeanne was the longest, and was “Reply paid.”
“This is going to cost a small fortune, young man,” said the nurse.
Doggie smiled as he drew out a £1 treasury note from his soldier’s pocket-book, the pathetic object containing a form of Will on the right-hand flap and on the left the directions for the making of the Will, concluding with the world-famous typical signature of Thomas Atkins.
“It’s a bust, Sister,” said he. “I’ve been saving up for it for months.”