omers the new star is 2000 years away," he concluded.

As I have said, he was a valuable addition to our mess. One day he took
me to a neighbouring village and introduced me to a fat
comfortable-looking Maire, who spread his hands on his capacious knees
and invited us to try a cooling nip of absinthe. After which he
produced from a small choice store a bottle of fifty-year-old brandy,
and made the town major take it away in token of a friendship that
began in the way-back days of 1915.

All this may not sound like war, but I am trying to write down some of
the average daily happenings in a field-artillery brigade that has seen
as much service as any brigade in the new armies.

For several days Wilde, the signalling officer, and the doctor
conducted an acrid argument that arose from the doctor's astounding
assertion that he had seen a Philadelphia base-ball player smite a
base-ball so clean and hard that it travelled 400 yards before it
pitched. Wilde, with supreme scorn, pointed out that no such claim had
been made even for a golf ball. The doctor made play with the names of
Speaker, Cobb, and other transatlantic celebrities. Then one day Wilde
rushed into the mess flourishing a London Sunday paper that referred in
glowing terms to a mighty base-ball hit of 136 yards, made on the Royal
Arsenal football ground; after which the doctor retired to cope with
the plague of boils that had descended upon the Brigade. This and a
severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred
patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils.
We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing
with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in
cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look
like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day,
when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his chin, appeared
plastered accordingly.

By July we had side-stepped north and were housed in a chateau that
really deserved the appellation, though it was far from being as
massively built as an average English country seat of like importance.
It belonged to one of the oldest families in France. Wide noble
staircases led to vast rooms made untenable by shell fire. Fragments of
rare stained glass littered the vacant private chapel. The most
valuable paintings, the best of the Louis XV. furniture, and the
choicest tapestry had been removed t