kit in a hut--he had given to his
batman. His one desire now was to escape from the eyes of his
fellow-men. He felt that he bore upon him the stigma of his disgrace,
obvious to any casual glance. He was the man who had been turned out
of the army as a hopeless incompetent. Even worse than the
slacker--for the slacker might have latent the qualities that he
lacked. Even at the best and brightest, he could only be mistaken for
a slacker, once more the likely recipient of white feathers from any
damsel patriotically indiscreet. The Colonel's letter brought him
little consolation. It is true that he carried it about with him in
his pocket-book; but the gibing eyes of observers had not the X-ray
power to read it there. And he could not pin it on his hat. Besides,
he knew that the kindly Colonel had stretched a point of veracity. No
longer could he take refuge in his cherished delicacy of constitution.
It would be a lie.

Peggy, in her softest and most pitying mood, never guessed the nature
of Doggie's ordeal. Those letters so brave, sometimes so playful, had
been written with shaky hand, misty eyes, throbbing head, despairing
heart. Looking back, it seemed to him one blurred dream of pain. His
brother officers were no worse than those in any other Kitchener
regiment. Indeed, the Colonel was immensely proud of them and sang
their praises to any fellow-dugout who would listen to him at the
Naval and Military Club. But how were a crowd of young men, trained in
the rough and tumble of public schools, universities and sport, and
now throbbing under the stress of the new deadly game, to understand
poor Doggie Trevor? They had no time to take him seriously, save to
curse him when he did wrong, and in their leisure time he became
naturally a butt for their amusement.

"Surely I don't have to sleep in there?" he asked the subaltern who
was taking him round on the day of his arrival in camp, and showed him
his squalid little cubby-hole of a hut with its dirty boards, its
cheap table and chair, its narrow sleep-dispelling little bedstead.

"Yes, it's a beastly hole, isn't it? Until last month we were under
canvas."

"Sleeping on the bare ground?"

"Wallowing in the mud like pigs. Not one of us without a cold. Never
had a such filthy time in my life."

Doggie looked about him helplessly, while the comforter smiled grimly.
Already his disconsolate attitude towards the dingy hutments of the
camp and the layer of thick mud on his b