ive in the hearts of two
or three of them, and the knowledge brought him considerable comfort.
It was strange to realize how the tentacles of his being stretched out
gropingly towards these (from the old Durdlebury point of view)
impossible friends. They had grafted themselves on to his life. Or was
that a correct way of putting it? Had they not, rather, all grafted
themselves on to a common stock of life, so that the one common sap
ran through all their veins?

It took him a long time to get this idea formulated, fixed and
accepted. But Doggie was not one to boggle at the truth, as he saw it.
And this was the truth. He, James Marmaduke Trevor of Denby Hall, was
a Tommy of the Tommies. He had lived the Tommy life intensely. He was
living it now. And the extraordinary part of it was that he didn't
want to be anything else but a Tommy. From the social or gregarious
point of view his life for the past year had been one of unclouded
happiness. The realization of it, now that he was clearly sizing up
the ramshackle thing which he called his existence, hit him like the
butt-end of a rifle. Hardship, cold, hunger, fatigue, stench, rats,
the dread of inefficiency--all these had been factors of misery which
he could never eliminate from his soldier's equation; but such free,
joyous, intimate companionship with real human beings he had never
enjoyed since he was born. He longed to be back among them, doing the
same old weary, dreary, things, eating the same old Robinson Crusoe
kind of food, crouching with them in the same old beastly hole in the
ground, while the Boche let loose hell on the trench. Mo Shendish's
grin and his "'Ere, get in aht of the rain," and his grip on his
shoulder, dragging him a few inches farther into shelter, were a
spiritual compensation transcending physical discomfitures and perils.

"It's all dam funny," he said half aloud.

But this was England, and although he was hedged about, protected and
restricted by War Office Regulation Red Tape twisted round to the
strength of steel cables, yet he was in command of telegraphs, of
telephones, and, in a secondary degree, of the railway system of the
United Kingdom.

He found himself deprecating the compulsory facilities of
communication in the civilized world. The Deanery must be informed of
his home-coming.

As soon as he could secure the services of a nurse he wrote out three
telegrams: one addressed "Conover, The Deanery, Durdlebury"; one to
Peddle at