ys
felt I ought to get down and walk. Instead of which he used to salute
me as smartly as he could. He will never know how cheap and embarrassed
he used to make me feel. I wish I knew enough to do him some justice.

And here once more is the leave boat, and this is another Christmas
Eve. It was a still twilight, with a calm sea and a swell on our
starboard beam. We rolled. We looked back on England sinking in the
night. A black smudge of a destroyer followed us over with its eye on
us. The main deck was crowded with soldiers--you could not get along
there--singing in their lifebelts; at times the chorus, if approved,
became a unanimous roar. They didn't want to be there. They didn't want
to die. They wanted to go home. But they sang with dolorous joy. The
chorus died; and we heard again the deep monody of the sea, like the
admonitory voice of fate. The battles of the Somme were to come before
the next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. And
where is the young officer who went ashore under the electric glare of
the base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree? Where is
that wild lieutenant of the Black Watch--he had a splendid eye, and a
voice for a Burns midnight--who cried rollicking answers from the back
of the crowd to the peremptory megaphone of the landing officer, till
the ship was loud and gay, and the authorities got really wild? And the
boy of a new draft, whose face, as I passed him where he had fallen
in,--the light dropped to it,--was pale and nervous, and his teeth
chattering! Ah, the men we met in France, and the faces we saw briefly,
but remember, that were before the Somme! Shadows, shadows.

It rained next morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the
trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect
of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in
an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my
northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept
missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint.
One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose
father was the devil and his mother an ass, plunged into a pond of
black Flanders mud as we passed, and raked us with solvent filth. We
wiped it off our mouths. God rest you merry, gentlemen. A land so
inundated that it inverted the raw and alien sky was on either hand.
The mud clung to the horses and mules like d