han anywhere else, even in the cabins
of small yachts anchored at night. But cigarettes were not in the
mind of the ladies who built and named that hut. Afterwards when
their hair and clothes reeked of a particularly offensive kind of
tobacco, it may have occurred to them that they were wiser than they
knew in choosing the name Woodbine.

But at first they were not thinking of tobacco. They meant to make a
little pun on their own name like the pun of the herald who gave
"_Ver non semper viret_" to the Vernons for a motto; associating
themselves thus modestly and shyly with the building they had given,
in which they served. Also they meant the name to call up in the
minds of the soldiers who used the hut all sorts of thoughts of home,
of English gardens, of old-fashioned flowers, of mothers' smiles and
kisses--the kisses perhaps not always mother's. The idea is a pretty
one, and the English soldier, like most cheerful people, is a
sentimentalist, yet I doubt if ten of the many thousands of men who
used that hut ever associated it with honeysuckle.

When I first saw "Woodbine" over the door of that hut, the name
filled me with astonishment. I knew of a Paradise Court in a grimy
city slum, and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a
Connaught bog which has somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But
these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain
sadness. "Woodbine" is a sheer astonishment. I hear the word and
think of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of old tree trunks
climbed over by delightful flowers. I think of open lattice windows,
of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole long train of thought
prepares me for or tends in any way to suggest this Woodbine.

It is a building. In the language of the army--the official
language--it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life
than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls
are thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains two long,
low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must
glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco
smoke.

Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one corner,
that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together
at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They
drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of
bread-and-butter. They write those letters home which express so