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It must not be supposed that I was privileged to hear these records daily read and thus draw my plans against the morrow; on the contrary, they were sometimes held back until the military news was staled by time or were guardedly communicated with blanks for names and the dead unnumbered. Potty, Pipes, and Piffle were very real to me, and lived like actual people in that dim garret.
Supports were being hurried forward. Ammunition was scarce. A feeling of anxiety, not unmixed with hope, is the rule. Noon. I am now back in Scarlet, as being more central to both actions now raging, one along the line of the Sandusky between General Piffle and the Army of the Centre, the other toward Grierson between Potty and the corps of Generals Green and Lafayette.
I climbed the ladder and shut the trap-door behind me. The air of the loft was close and musty and smelt of mildewed hay. It was not the sort of spot which one would have selected of one's own free will to sit in for any length of time. There was a rustling noise, and a rat scurried across the rickety floor, drawing a startled gasp from Audrey and a disgusted 'Oh, piffle! from the Nugget.
Late last night, orders reached General Pipes to fall back on this place, where his reserves were diverted to support Piffle, hard-pressed on the Sandusky. This morning the manoeuvre was effected in good order, the enemy following us through Grierson and capturing one hundred prisoners. The battle was resumed on the Sandusky with the same fury; and it is still raging as I write.
"Stuff and rubbish, mush and piffle!" he muttered, closing the book and pushing it from him across the table; "love, as usual, grossly out of proportion to the ensemble. That theory of the earth's rotation, you know; all these absurd books are built on it. Why do men read 'em? They grin when they do it! Love is only the sixth sense just one-sixth of a man's existence.
As they sipped their tea the two elder women chatted complacently about the matinée, about their acquaintances, about other women in the tea-room and the gowns they had on, about bridge hands the usual small talk of afternoon tea. To Jane, oppressed with her two secrets, all at once their conversation seemed the dreariest piffle.
"So that's the kind of piffle that managers and actors have to go up against," laughed Bunch. "They don't go up against it any more, Bunch," I said. "They are shifty young guys in the theatrical business nowadays, and they sidestep the hammer-throwers. Mr. Stale is a back number, and his harpoon can't stop a dollar bill from flutering into any man's box office."
These, and in fact all that comes before the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest piffle, very tiresome. Most exasperating of all is the stupid dialogue, which makes one hope that the man who wrote it died a painful, lingering death.
If only those folks who write and print and read such piffle, no matter what their nationality, could have had five minutes' look at the German trenches and another five minutes' look at the French and British trenches never again would they query, 'Who started the war?" We of the Allied army knew nothing of trench warfare.
It would only add another shocking detail to the next exposition of the scandal." "Detestable people," she said, in a voice that must have been heard by our gossip, although she evidently did not realise the application of the description to herself and her friend. "Let's be thankful," I whispered to Anne, "that I'm no longer writing this sort of piffle to amuse them. If it hadn't been for you..."
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