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Updated: June 23, 2025
When they made a change it was for the worse, for they finally dressed themselves in the khaki uniforms of our own soldiers, and by this means effected several surprises. It is typical of the good humour of the British that very many of these khaki-clad burghers have passed through our hands, and that no penalty has ever been inflicted upon them for their dangerous breach of the rules of war.
Khaki-clad figures were everywhere; some were accompanied by daintily-clad girls, proud of their soldier lovers; others were walking with portly old gentlemen, their generous grandfathers or godfathers, most probably; while many of them had given themselves over to their mothers for the morning.
I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van in Amiens station.
"What's what!" "That noise. Sounds like a party coming along the communication trench!" The talk was in tense whispers, and the listening was now of the same tenseness. Two khaki-clad Sammies stood on the alert in the muddy ditch, dignified by the title, "trench," and tried to pierce the darkness that was like a pall of black velvet over everything. "Hear it?" inquired he who had first spoken.
They kept on, ever on the alert for a sight of the Germans, ever hoping for a sight of their own khaki-clad comrades. They appeared to be marching away from the scene of the battle, or battles. The firing became fainter. The country was now quite open, consisting of little hills and valleys. Each time they came to a height which afforded a place for observation, they looked all around.
All the talk on the way up was of the beautiful quietude of the area we were riding through: no weed-choked houses with the windows all blown in; no sound of guns, no line of filled-up ambulances; few lorries on the main thoroughfares; only the khaki-clad road-repairers and the "Gas Alert" notice-boards to remind us we were in a British area.
And now let us follow some of these khaki-clad millions across the seas, through the reinforcement camps, and the great supply bases, towards that fierce reality of war to which everything tends. It was about the middle of February, after my return from the munition factories, that I received a programme from the War Office of a journey in France, which I was to be allowed to make.
As they dipped into the last depression between them and the wall and halted for a minute's consultation, a khaki-clad, shrivelled figure of a man leaped up from behind a sand-ridge, and raced toward Cunningham, shouting to him in a dialect he had no knowledge of and gesticulating wildly.
Watson and the two other girls beckoned to them to hurry, and they had no chance for further conversation. Then, just as Betty was about to broach the subject of the boys to Mrs. Watson, the unexpected happened. A khaki-clad figure, cutting across their path at a dead run, almost collided with them, paused to gasp an apology, stopped still and stared. It was Allen!
The consciousness of his danger would be like the weight of an unborn child under her heart. He was husband and father and lover to her now; he seemed to be taking with him to France the last remnant of her girlhood. At Charing Cross she found the khaki-clad figure. He was waiting for her below the clock.
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