They had the same trouble as before with the box, and though they had not so far to go it was heavier. Bourne was relieved when it was placed finally in a corner of the hut which was now the orderly-room. He looked about him, and the first thing he saw was a notice, printed in large capitals: Mind what you say, the Hun has listening apparatus, and can hear you. It was a disturbing statement, and he concluded that it was intended only for the signaller; but he saw it later posted up on the outside of some huts. The colour-sergeant, greeting him affably, administered a more serious shock.

‘Bourne, you will sleep in the orderly-room in future.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, amazed, but with the mechanical obedience required of him. He didn’t want them to see and covet the food he had brought back with him, so after a pause he said:

‘I shall go for my blankets, sir; and for some things I left with one of my chums.’

The colour-sergeant nodded, and he went out with his pack still on his shoulders, and talked to Shem and Martlow for a little while before they went on parade.

‘You’ll never come back,’ said Shem in a matter-of-fact way. ‘You’ve got a cushy job; an’ if they didn’t want you, they’d have sent you back before now. You’d better keep one tin o’ sardines, an’ take half the cake with you.’

‘I don’t want it. I had a good feed in the town.’

The division of the food proposed by Shem’s practical mind seemed to him too like a formal act dissolving their partnership. He went back to the orderly-room in a mood of apathy, and copied orders into the book. The adjutant had complained that his handwriting was too small; and he tried to write large, with the result that his script became uneven and stiff, like that of a child, who is thinking in letters, instead of in words or in phrases. It seemed to him, somehow, symbolical of the loss of balance which he had detected in himself in the last few days. He heard the colour-sergeant speaking in his usual tone of affected diffidence, the sharp, business-like whisper of the corporal, and Johnson’s, an empty echo. Occasionally Reynolds or Johnson would give him a paper to type, and for the moment he was busy with the clicking keys. The thing finished, he would sink again into apathy, thinking, with a singular intensity, about nothing, his consciousness not submerged or inhibited, but so dilated that it became too tenuous to hold any reality.

The adjutant came in, and after sitting at his table for a little while with his accustomed air of patient perplexity, went to the field-telephone. To overhear one-half of a conversation is always a little mystifying, but the adjutant’s part of it seemed idiotic. Yes, he was pepper; and apparently he received, and in some cases repeated, instructions concerning a rat-hunt, and these were all about rats, and poles, which would be found at Potsdam Dump, and salt. Bourne came back from the emptiness of his interior conscience to take a little interest in the matter. Pepper and salt were code words for two battalions in the Brigade; and when the adjutant went back to his place Bourne scribbled on a scrap of paper the question, ‘What are rats?’ and passed it to the signaller, who wrote underneath, ‘gas-cylinders’, and pushed it back to him. If the Hun continued to develop his inventive faculty at this alarming rate, they would soon all be using the deaf and dumb language.