y, but not half swiftly enough. We pass town and
hamlet. Advertisement hoardings, grotesque flat images of cows,
outrageous commendations of whisky or pills, appear in the fields.
We are getting near London. Pipes are laid by. We fidget and fret.
The houses we pass are closer together, get closer still, merge into
a sea of grey-slated roofs. The air is thick, smoke-laden. The train
slows down, stops, starts again, draws up finally by the long
platform.

Then----! To every man his own dreams of heaven hereafter. To every
man his own way of spending his leave.

CHAPTER XVII

A HOLIDAY

Holidays, common enough in civil life, are rare joys in the B.E.F.
Leave is obtainable occasionally. But nobody speaks of leave as
"holidays." It is a thing altogether apart. It is almost sacred. It
is too thrilling, too rapturous to be compared to anything we knew
before the war. We should be guilty of a kind of profanity if we
spoke of leave as "holidays." It ought to have a picturesque and
impressive name of its own; but no one has found or even attempted to
find an adequate name for it. If we were pagans instead of professing
to be Christians, if we danced round fountains and set up statues of
Pan for our worship and knew nothing of the Hebrew spirit, we might
get a name for "leave" out of the vocabulary of our religious life.
Being what we are we cannot do that, but we rightly decline to
compare leave with ordinary holidays.

Only a few men in the army succeed in getting what is properly
called a holiday, a day or two off work with a change of scene. I got
one, thanks to M. It is one of the many things, perhaps the least of
them, for which I have to thank his friendship.

M. had formed an exaggerated, I fear a totally erroneous, idea of my
powers of entertaining men. It occurred to him that it would be a
good thing if I gave lectures to the men of the cavalry brigade to
which he was attached. What he said to the general who commanded the
division I do not know, but somehow, between the general and M., the
thing was worked. I found myself with a permit to travel on railways
otherwise barred to me and three golden days before me.

No one can say that life in my three camps was dull. Life is never
dull or monotonous for a man who has plenty of pleasant work to do
and a party of good friends as fellow-workers. But a change is always
agreeable, and I looked forward to my trip with impatient excitement.

It was like being