t--you know how he swanks
about it--said the Precedent or General Joffre had given a French
kid who was only fourteen and had enlisted and killed a lot of
Huns, till they found him out and sent him back to school, a legion
of honours or something. Smith said it was a medal; I said that was
rot, and that it meant they'd given him a lot of other chaps to
command, and I showed him what the Bible said about a legion of
devils, and I got hold of a crib to Caesar and proved to him that
legions were soldiers. That shut him up. So, Pan, old man, mind you
get the French to let you bring us other fellows out, or if you
can't bring it off, then come home with a medal or something.

"Peter," I called out. Peter had turned his back on me and was
pretending to be absorbed in a distant speck in the sky.

"Major Peter," I said ingratiatingly, with a salute. Peter turned round.
He was very red.

"I didn't mean you to read all that rot," he said. "I meant what he says
at the end."

I read on--this time in silence:

I say, have you killed any Huns yet? Very decent of the Head to
tell your governor you could have an extra week. We miss you at
center forward. So hurry up, but mind you don't get torpeedod--we
hope they'll just miss you. It would be rotten luck if you never
saw one. We've given up German this term--beastly language; it's
just like a Hun to keep the verb till the end, so that you never
know what he's driving at.

Then followed a sentence heavily underlined:

_By the way I'll let you have that knife you wanted me to swop last
term if you'll bring me a bayonet. Only mind it's got some blood on
it, German blood I mean_.--Yours to a cinder,

ARTHUR JACKSON.

I handed this priceless missive back to Peter.

"Cheek, isn't it?" said Peter rather hurriedly. "His old knife for a
bayonet!"

"But if you put 'the Front' at the top of your letters, Major Peter, you
can't be surprised at his asking for one, you know."

Peter blushed.

"Well, I heard Dad say we were the back of the Front, and the fellows
wouldn't think anything of me if I hadn't been _near_ the Front," he
said, apologetically. "Hullo, they're going up!"

An aeroplane was skimming along the ground as a moor-hen scuppers across
the water, the mechanics having assisted her initial progress by
pushing