hose initiated in the ways
of the trench zone, although those outside of it may miss them; but
everyone will see that prolonged stays in the one position give the
gardener his opportunity. In this particular unit of the Blue Marines
was a gunner who intensely loved the potting and planting, the turning
over of yielding earth, the bedding-out and transplanting, the watering
and weeding and tending of a garden, possibly because the greater part
of his life had been lived at sea in touch with nothing more yielding
than a steel plate or a hard plank.

The gunner was known throughout the unit by no other name than Mary,
fittingly taken from the nursery rhyme which inquires, "Mary, Mary,
quite contrary, how does your garden grow?" The similarity between Mary
of the Blue Marines and Mary of the nursery rhyme ends, however, with
the first line, since Blue Marine Mary made no attempt to rear "silver
bells and cockle shells" (whatever they may be) all in a row. His whole
energies were devoted to the raising of much more practical things,
like lettuces, radishes, carrots, spring onions, and any other
vegetable which has the commendable reputation of arriving reasonably
early at maturity.

Twice that spring Mary's labors had been wasted because the section had
moved before the time was ripe from a gardener's point of view, and
although Mary strove to transplant his garden by uprooting the
vegetables, packing them away in a box in the motor, and planting them
out in the new position, the vegetables failed to survive the breaking
of their home ties, and languished and died in spite of Mary's tender
care. After the first failure he tried to lay out a portable garden,
enlisting the aid of "Chips" the carpenter in the manufacture of a
number of boxes, in which he placed earth and his new seedlings. This
attempt, however, failed even more disastrously than the first, the
O.C. having made a most unpleasant fuss on the discovery of two large
boxes of mustard and cress "cluttering up," as he called it, the
gun-mountings on one of the armored cars, and, when the section moved
suddenly in the dead of night, refusing point-blank to allow any
available space to be loaded up with Mary's budding garden. Mary's
plaintive inquiry as to what he was to do with the boxes was met by the
brutal order to "chuck the lot overboard," and the counter-inquiry as
to whether he thought this show was a perambulating botanical gardens.

So Mary lost his second