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Laurencine sleeps here. The telegram was entirely characteristic of his stepfather curt, exact, realistic, kind. He thought: "Three girls, by Jove!" The early sun, carrying into autumn the tradition of a magnificent summer, shone on the artillery camps. The four guns of the No. 2 Battery of the Second Brigade were ranged side by side in the vast vague space in front of the officers' hutments.
Some way on in spring came engineers and workmen from Sweden; going to build roads, put up hutments, work in various ways, blasting, levelling, getting up supplies of food, hiring teams of horses, making arrangements with owners of land by the waterside; what what was it all about? This is in the wilds, where folk never came but those who lived there?
Quick splashes of light where the bombs exploded, great columns of gray smoke mushrooming up to the sky, then feeble licks of flame growing in intensity of brightness where the incendiary bombs, taking hold of stores and hutments, advertised the success of the raid. The squadron swung for home. Tam with one eye for his leader and one for the possible dangers on his flank, was a mere automaton.
"Wallowing in the mud like pigs. Not one of us without a cold. Never had a such filthy time in my life." Doggie looked about him helplessly, while the comforter smiled grimly. Already his disconsolate attitude towards the dingy hutments of the camp and the layer of thick mud on his beautiful new boots had diverted his companion. "Couldn't I have this furnished at my own expense?
In consequence the Battalion, which had had very little training for the past five months, turned its attention to practising the attack in some cornfields near the hutments it occupied. The attack was henceforth to be made by successive waves of men and to each wave was assigned a particular objective.
Beyond the dusty village of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster fell off in blotches as the war went on, we went along the straight highroad to Albert, through the long and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women and played solemn games with "the bairns"; and so, past camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken tower of the church with her Babe outstretched above the fields of death as though as a peace-offering to this world at war.
Braziers were rampant in every Company, swelling and overflowing throughout the entire hutments in belching clouds of noxious smoke that permeated an atmosphere impenetrable by human eyes with an odour of smouldering wood, empty milk-tins and tobacco. Those nights!
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