ght him a little garrulous, but
Thompson encouraged him to talk. He told us all about his job. It was
his duty to go up in captive balloons and send down messages to the
artillery. It was, by his account, a sea-sicky business, worse by several
degrees than crossing the Channel in the leave boat. Thompson, who has
a thirst for every kind of information, questioned and cross-questioned
the boy. After dinner--dinner was Thompson's name for our meal--I
prepared to go to sleep. Thompson arranged valises on the floor in such
a way that I could stretch my legs. The boy went on talking. He told
Thompson that he had dropped out of the ballooning business and that he
was going to X. to submit to a special course of training. I forget what
it was, bombing probably, or the use of trench mortars, possibly
map reading or--a subject part of the school curriculum of our
grandmothers--the use of globes. The army has a passion for imparting
knowledge of any kind to temporary lieutenants. I went to sleep while
Thompson was explaining just where the boy's particular course of
instruction was given, a camp some three or four miles out of X.
Thompson has an amazing knowledge of what naturalists would call the
habitat of the various parts of the army.

At 3 a.m. I was awakened from my sleep. We had reached, an hour late,
the junction at which we had to change. Thompson and the boy were both
alert and cheerful. They had, I fancy, been talking all the time. Our
junction proved to be a desolate, windswept platform, without a sign of
shelter of any kind except a bleak-looking cabin, the habitation of the
local R.T.O. Thompson roused him ruthlessly and learned that, with luck,
we might expect our next train to start at six. I shivered. Three hours,
the very coldest in the twenty-four, on that platform, did not strike me
as a pleasant prospect Thompson used a favourite phrase of his.

"After all," he said, "it's war; what the French call _La Guerre_."
He professed to have discovered, not from the R.T.O. but from a sleepy
French railway official, that the train, our train in which we were to
travel, was somewhere in the neighbourhood, waiting for its engine. It
did not come to us from anywhere else; but made its start, so to speak
took its rise, at that junction. Thompson and our new friend, the boy,
proposed to get into the train when they found it.

Thompson can speak French of a sort, but he does not understand the
language as spoken by the Fre