‘We’re goin’ into the bloody line again,’ shouted Minton, who was marching just ahead of Bourne.

‘Well, it’s cushy enough up this part o’ the line now,’ said Pritchard resignedly.

‘Cushy be buggered,’ said Minton angrily.

They continued a little way along the road to Vermelles, and halted finally in Philosophe, a mining village, brick-built and grimy, from which the inhabitants had been evacuated. There they fell out and went to billets in sullen silence. Almost immediately Shem and Martlow were posted with fieldglasses and whistles to give warning of the approach of enemy aircraft. The troops were ordered to keep close in to the houses when moving about the village, and to take cover when the whistles were blown.

Bourne went off to the orderly-room. The main street of Philosophe was at right angles to the road from Mazingarbe to Vermelles, and at the end of it was another street, roughly parallel to the road, the orderly-room being in the third house down on the left. The village was practically undamaged by shellfire, but it was a dour, unlovely place. One or two families remained there, and children either belonging to them, or to Mazingarbe, which was not far away, passed up and down the street with large baskets on their arms at intervals through the day, shouting, ‘Engleesh pancakes, Engleesh pancakes,’ with a curious note of melancholy or boredom in their high-pitched voices.

Bourne, quite inadvertently, had improved his position in the orderly-room. The colour-sergeant, with his usual irony, had referred to the possibility of making him a permanent member of the orderly-room staff, and Bourne had replied with great firmness that he would prefer to go back to his company. As they saw at once that he really meant it, they became more friendly. While he and the lance-corporal unpacked the boxes, he asked for the notebooks and pencils which Sergeant-Major Robinson wanted, and got them without any difficulty. When he and the lance-corporal went for their dinners, he took them to the sergeant-major, with whom were Sergeant Tozer and the quarter-bloke.

‘You’re bloody lucky to be in the orderly-room for a spell,’ the sergeant-major told him. ‘The C.O. thinks the men have got slack, and says that all time available must be spent in drill. Company-guards as well as headquarter-guard are to parade outside the orderly-room for inspection at eleven o’clock every morning; an’ I suppose there’ll be working-parties up the line every bloody night. How do you like Captain Havelock in th’ orderly-room? The men call him Janey. Saw him walking over to Brigade with the C.O. a few minutes ago. Brigade’s at Le Brèbis. Captain Malet’s coming back to the company in a few days. We’re going to spend most of our time carrying bloody gas-cylinders up Potsdam Alley: that’s what I heard anyway.’

The prospect of carrying gas-cylinders, which weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds apiece, and were slung on a pole carried on the shoulders of two men, proved conclusively to Bourne that the orderly-room had its uses. The work was made more difficult by the fact that the men had to wear their P.H. gas helmets, which were hot and suffocating. He went back to the orderly-room in a somewhat chastened frame of mind.