of attack is the leave-list unpigeonholed. The
weeks pass and your turn creeps close, while you pray that the lull may
last until the day when, with a heavy haversack and a light heart, you
set off to become a transient in Arcadia. The desire for a taste of
freedom is sharpened by delay; but finally, after disappointment and
postponement, the day arrives and you depart. Exchanging a "So long"
with less fortunate members of the mess, you realise a vast difference
in respective destinies. To-morrow the others will be dodging crumps,
archies, or official chits "for your information, please"; to-morrow,
with luck, you will be dodging taxis in London.

During the journey you begin to cast out the oppressive feeling that a
world and a half separates you from the pleasantly undisciplined life
you once led. The tense influence of those twin bores of active service,
routine and risk, gradually loosens hold, and your state of mind is
tuned to a pitch half-way between the note of battle and that of a
bank-holiday.

Yet a slight sense of remoteness lingers as you enter London. At first
view the Charing Cross loiterers seem more foreign than the peasants of
Picardy, the Strand and Piccadilly less familiar than the
Albert-Pozieres road. Not till a day or two later, when the remnants of
strained pre-occupation with the big things of war have been charmed
away by old haunts and old friends, do you feel wholly at home amid your
rediscovered fellow-citizens, the Man in the Street, the Pacifist, the
air-raid-funk Hysteric, the Lady Flag-Seller, the War Profiteer, the
dear-boy Fluff Girl, the Prohibitionist, the England-for-the-Irish
politician, the Conscientious Objector, the hotel-government bureaucrat,
and other bulwarks of our united Empire. For the rest, you will want to
cram into ten short days the average experiences of ten long weeks. If,
like most of us, you are young and foolish, you will skim the bubbling
froth of life and seek crowded diversion in the lighter follies, the
passing shows, and l'amour qui rit. And you will probably return to the
big things of war tired but mightily refreshed, and almost ready to
welcome a further spell of routine and risk.

The one unsatisfactory aspect of leave from France, apart from its
rarity, is the travelling. This, in a region congested by the more
important traffic of war, is slow and burdensome to the impatient
holiday-maker. Occasionally the Flying Corps officer is able to
substitute