uice lacked advancement
through faults not its own. I mean, there was the chlorinated water,
which for all its virtues was hardly popular, and there was the sugar,
which was half-and-half, associating, very friendly, with tea dust.
Moreover, this same _sugar_, in its nocturnal progress at the bottom of
a sandbag, while its carrier now stepped into an artificial lake and
now lay down for the bullets of Quinque Jimmy to pass by unimpeded, had
acquired an interspersion of hairy particles; as generally did our loaves
of bread, which in some cases might easily be supposed to be wearing
wigs. In this manner, the germ-destroyer, the intrusion of tea dust and
the moulted coat of sandbags, combined to prevent the lime juice, like
crabbed poet, "from being as generally tasted as he deserved to be."

At Company Headquarters, too, there was often in those easy times a rival
beverage. Here and there a messenger might be sent back to an estaminet
and return to the war with comforts within a couple of hours.

Yet I myself did my best to cultivate the "lime-juice habit," and to me
it remains an integral part of the interiors, gone but not forgotten,
of many a Rotten Row in the Bethune Sectors. I see its gloomy and
mottled surface, in the aluminium tumbler, besides my platter of "meat and
vegetable" or (as to-day) of bully rehabilitated by the smoky cooks;
and about me the shape of the lean-to dugout rises sufficiently high for
a tall man to enter without going on all fours. Here, is the earth
settee, running round three sides of the table, there, the glory hole in
which, one at a time, we crawl to sleep, with a fine confused bedding of
British Warms and sandbags. The purple typescript of _Comic Cuts_,[4]
in which what imagination and telescope has striven to reveal of the
"other fellow," mind, body and soul, is set in military prose, flaps
neglectedly from its nail. In their furious tints, the ladies of the
late Kirchner beam sweetly upon him who sets put on patrol and him who
returns; while in the convenient niches between the walls and the
corrugated iron roof above, which as a protection might perhaps amount
to the faith of the ostrich, Mills bombs and revolvers and ammunition
nestle.

There, given the noise of shells travelling over, trench mortar bombs
dropping short, machine guns firing high--or of shells alighting abruptly
on the parados, trench mortar bombs thundering into the next traverse,
machine guns in spitfire temper st