ll, there is a
probability that when you rejoin, the C.O. will be afflicted
with a grievous lapse of memory and that he will be persuaded
that you received your wound during the attack on the wiring
party.

"As I said before, laddie, we're all like the Scots wha' hae wi'
Wallace bled and are going to our gory bed or to victory.
Possibly both. But I will remain steadfast to my philosophy, and
if I am condemned to the said sanguinolent couch, I will do my
best to derive from it the utmost enjoyment possible. All kinds
of poets and such-like lusty loons have shed their last drop of
ink in the effort to describe the pleasures of life--but it will
be reserved for the disembodied spirit of Phineas McPhail to
write the great Philosophic poem of the world's history, which
will be entitled 'The Pleasures of Death.' While you're doing
nothing, laddie, you might bestir yourself and find an
enlightened publisher who would be willing to give me an
ante-mortem advance, in respect of royalties accruing to my
ghost.

"Mo, to whom I have read the last paragraph, says he always knew
that eddication affected the brain. With which incontrovertible
proposition and our joint love, I now conclude this epistle.

"Yours, PHINEAS."

"Of all the blazing imbeciles!" Doggie cried aloud. Why the
unprintable unprintableness couldn't Phineas mind his own business?
Why had he given his silly accident of fortune away in this childish
manner? Why had he told Jeanne of his cotton-wool upbringing? His
feet, even that of his wounded leg, tingled to kick Phineas. Of course
Jeanne, knowing him now to be such a gilded ass, would have nothing
more to do with him. It explained her letter. He damned Phineas to all
eternity, in terms compared with which the curse of Saint Ernulphus
enunciated by the late Mr. Shandy was a fantastic benediction. "If I
had a dog," quoth my Uncle Toby, "I would not curse him so." But if
Uncle Toby had heard Doggie of the Twentieth Century Armies who also
swore terribly in Flanders, for dog he would have substituted
rattlesnake or German officer.

Yet such is the quiddity of the English Tommy, that through this
devastating anathema ran a streak of love which at the end turned the
whole thing into forlorn derision. And as soon as he could laugh, he
saw things in a clear light. Both of his two friend