tting by a
flickering candle in moody silence. I asked him to come with me to the
village. He put on his great-coat and we walked along the duckboards on
to the road. It was intensely dark and we were conscious of the silent
fall of snow.

"What sort of a day did you have?" I asked.

"Undiluted misery. We marched to the quarry and when we got there we
found there was nothing to do, because the train hadn't turned up. So we
waited in the wind and snow, just walking up and down, stamping with our
feet and trying to get warm. Lieutenant Rowlatt was in charge of us. He
wouldn't let us leave the quarry or go into an estaminet. And he only
gave us half an hour for dinner. Of course he spent most of the time in
an estaminet himself, eating eggs and chips and flirting with the girl
... I couldn't keep warm and there was no shelter anywhere. It was like
doing an eight-hour guard."

All the windows in the streets of the village were shuttered, but the
light shone through cracks and chinks--a promise of warmth within that
cheered us a little.

We entered an estaminet. It was crowded. Soldiers were standing round
the walls waiting for vacant seats. We went to another place, but that
too was crowded. Indeed, they were all crowded. Nevertheless, it was
better to stand in the warmth than to walk about stiff-limbed in the
slush and falling snow. We went into the next estaminet we came to. We
entered the main room. An oil lamp was hanging from the ceiling. In the
middle there was a long table and soldiers were seated round it,
squeezed tightly together, eating eggs and chips and drinking wine or
coffee. We leaned up against the wall with a number of others and waited
our turn. The air was hot and moist and smelt of stale tobacco, burning
fat, and steaming clothes. There was a glowing stove at one end of the
room. It looked like a red-hot spherical urn on a low black pedestal. A
big bowl of liquid fat was seething on the fire. A woman with flaming
cheeks was throwing handfuls of sliced potatoes into it while she held a
saucepan in which a number of eggs were spluttering. The heat was
becoming intolerable and we edged away from the stove. We waited
patiently. More and more men came in until there was no standing room
left. The conversation was boisterous and vulgar, much of it at the
expense of the woman, who laughed frequently and pretended to feel
shocked and called the soldiers "Naughty boyss." A few men rose from the
table from t