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Next morning Munsey and I were in the cookhouse, trying to moisten a couple of hardtack biscuits with what juice we could extract from a piece of bacon rind, when an airplane hummed overhead and the attention of one of our anti-aircraft guns was immediately diverted to the bird.
Some have been working in wards, some have been pushing trollies in the corridors, some have been shovelling coke, some have been toiling in the cookhouse or stores, some have been shifting loads of bedding to the fumigator, some have been on "sanitary fatigue," some have been cleaning windows or whitewashing walls, some have been writing or typing documents, some have been spending their rest-hour in slumber or over a game of billiards.
Our sleeping-place, a neat room with a matted floor opens from this, and on the other side there is a similar room, and a small eating-room with a grass cookhouse beyond, from which an obliging old Chinaman who persistently calls us "sir," brings our food. We have had for each meal, tea, preserved milk, coffee, kalo, biscuits, butter, potatoes, goats' flesh, and ohelos.
One, along with his people, built the cookhouse; another, the store; another, the banana and yam-house; another, the washing-house; another, the boys and girls' house; the houses for servants and teachers, the Schoolhouse, and the large shed, a kind of shelter where Natives sat and talked when not at work about the premises.
I hastened to the dugout he had indicated as Scotty's retreat and found him in the innermost corner, pretending to be asleep; he didn't answer until I called him three or four times. "Scotty, the O.C. wants to know why you left the cookhouse without guard permitting some Algerians to eat up his bacon and stuff, and, further, why you ran away under fire.
The action on the Somme was well under way when one morning at daybreak, making my way to the cookhouse, I was greeted, "Hello, Grant, hoos awa' wi' ye, laddie? Ma sontes, but you're lookin' fine! An' damned if he isn't a Sergeant!" It was Scotty, reinstated in our unit in his former capacity of cook, and he had brought with him his nerve, his twinkle, his bow legs and all.
When the mule stuck his nose into the hot peelings he jerked backwards into the door of the cookhouse, the driver's back struck the wall over the entrance and he was shot clean off the mule's back head-foremost into the cesspool 10 feet away.
We only ever saw her on Thursdays and we all looked forward to those days. The regular cookhouse staff came under "Jackie", Corporal Jackson and she and her girls were billeted in a private house nearly opposite Bowden Battery in a road running parallel with Fort Austin Avenue.
We did not say much when we went indoors, but the officer muttered and pulled his retriever's ears. He was a disgraceful, overfed doormat of a dog; and when he waddled off to my cookhouse to be fed, I had a brilliant idea. At eleven o'clock that officer's dog was nowhere to be found, and you never heard such a fuss as his owner made.
I pulled the netting away, but the hole was much too deep for so small a creature to get out by itself, and it was much too frightened to let me catch it. With great difficulty I extricated myself and ran to the cookhouse, where I soon enlisted Bridget's aid. We got some small pieces of soft raw meat and crawled to the top of the bank again.
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