There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost:

‘Where the deuce is the draft?’

The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black down-side. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration.

‘There’s a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven’s parade ground. The draft’s round that, sir,’ he said. Tietjens said:

‘Good God!’ in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, ‘I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them…You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a sea-gull…And called you ‘OP’ Hunkey!…Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where’s that Canadian sergeant-major? Where’s the officer in charge of the draft?’

Sergeant-Major Cowley said:

‘Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the…some river where they come from. You couldn’t stop them, sir. It was their first German plane…And they going up the line to-night, sir.’

‘To-night!’ Tietjens exclaimed. ‘Next Christmas!’ The sergeant-major said:

‘Poor boys!’ and continued to gaze into the distance. ‘I heard another good one, sir,’ he said. ‘The answer to the one about the King saluting a private soldier and he not taking any notice is: when he’s dead…But if you marched a company into a field through a gateway and you wanted to get it out again but you did not know any command in the drill book for change of direction, what would you do, sir?…You have to get that company out, but you must not use About Turn, or Right or Left Wheel…There’s another one, too, about saluting…The officer in charge of draft is Second-Lieutenant Hotchkiss…But he’s an A.S.C. officer and turned of sixty. A farrier he is, sir in civil life. An A.S.C. major was asking me, sir, very civil, if you could not detail someone else. He says he doubts if Second Lieutenant Hitchcock…Hotchkiss could walk as far as the station, let alone march the men, him not knowing anything but cavalry words of command, if he knows them. He’s only been in the army a fortnight…’

Tietjens turned from the idyllic scene with the words:

‘I suppose the Canadian sergeant-major and Lieutenant Hotchkiss are doing what they can to get their men come back.’

He re-entered the hut.

Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him.

‘There’s all this bumph,’ he said, ‘just come from all the headquarters in the bally world.’

Tietjens said cheerfully:

‘What’s it all about?’ There were, the other answered, Garrison Headquarter orders, Divisional orders, Lines of Communication orders, half a dozen A.F.W.B. two four two’s. A terrific strafe from First Army forwarded from Garrison H.Q. about the draft’s not having reached Hazebrouck the day before yesterday. Tietjens said:

‘Answer them politely to the effect that we had orders not to send off the draft without its complement of four hundred Canadian Railway Service men—the fellows in furred hoods. They only reached us from Etaples at five this afternoon without blankets or ring papers. Or any other papers for the matter of that.’

Mackenzie was studying with increased gloom a small buff memorandum slip:

‘This appears to be meant for you privately,’ he said.

‘I can’t make head or tail of it otherwise. It isn’t marked private.’

He tossed the buff slip across the table.

Tietjens sank down bulkily on to his bully-beef case. He read on the buff at first the initials of the signature, ‘E.C. Genl.’, and then: ‘For God’s sake keep your wife off me. I will not have skirts round my H.Q. You are more trouble to me than all the rest of my command put together.’

Tietjens groaned and sank more deeply on to his beef case. It was as if an unseen and unsuspected wild beast had jumped on his neck from an over-hanging branch.