rhythmic tramp of feet that night, into the ceaseless refrain: "Jeanne!
Jeanne!"

He opened his eyes again and frowned at the blue English sky. It had
no business to proclaim simple serenity when his mind was in such a
state of complex tangle. It was all very well to think of
Jeanne--Jeanne, whom it was unlikely that Fate would ever allow him to
see again, even supposing the war ended during his lifetime; but there
was Peggy--Peggy, his future wife, who had stuck to him loyally
through good and evil repute. Yes, there was Peggy--not the faintest
shadow of doubt about it. Doggie kept on frowning at the blue sky.
Blighty was a very desirable country, but in it you were compelled to
think. And enforced thought was an infernal nuisance. The beastly
trenches had their good points after all. There you were not called
upon to think of anything; the less you thought, the better for your
job; you just ate your bully-beef and drank your tea and cursed
whizz-bangs and killed a rat or two, and thanked God you were alive.

Now that he came to look at it in proper perspective, it wasn't at all
a bad life. When had he been worried to death, as he was now? And
there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet
ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were
hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose
spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of
Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according
to legend, though, modestly, he would never own to it, seized two
Boches by the neck and knocked their heads together till they died,
and who, musically inclined, would sit at his, Doggie's, feet while he
played on his penny whistle all the sentimental tunes he had ever
heard of; Sergeant Ballinghall, a tower of a man, a champion amateur
heavy-weight boxer, with a voice compared with which a megaphone
sounded like a maiden's prayer, and a Bardolphian nose and an eagle
eye and the heart of a broody hen, who had not only given him boxing
lessons, but had pulled him through difficult places innumerable ...
and scores of others. He wondered what they were doing. He also was
foolish enough to wonder whether they missed him, forgetting for the
moment that if a regiment took seriously to missing their comrades
sent to Kingdom Come or Blighty, they would be more like weeping
willows than destroyers of Huns.

All the same, he knew that he would always l