to the telephone in the front line, then he realized that he
was called upon to be not only a personal mascot, but a mascot to the
battalion, and he sat himself upon the telephone and called down a
blessing on that cable, so that it remained whole for two days and a
night when by all the rules it should have been in a thousand pieces.
"And even if I didn't _really_ do it all myself," he said, "anyhow I
_did_ make some of the men in the trench smile a little that morning, and
there wasn't so _very_ much smiling going on just then, you know."

After that morning he lived in my pocket, sometimes sniffing at an empty
pipe, sometimes trying to read letters from Mistress which joined him
every day. We had gone North to a more gentlemanly part of the line, and
his duties took but little of his time, so that anything novel, like a
pair of pliers or an order from the Director of Army Signals, was always
welcome. To begin with he took up rather more than his fair share of the
pocket, but he rapidly thinned down. Alas! in the rigours of the campaign
he also lost his voice; and his little black collar, his only kit,
disappeared.

Then, just when we seemed settled for the winter, we were ordered South
again. Common knew what that meant, a busy time for him. We moved down
slowly, and he sampled billet after billet, but we arrived at last and
sat down to wait for the day.

And then he began to get nervous. Always he was present when the
operations were discussed; he had seen all the maps; he knew exactly what
was expected of us. And he didn't like it.

"It's more than a fellow can do," he said; "at least to be certain of. I
can blow away the shells in front and the shells from the right, but if
Master's map is correct we're going to get enfiladed from the left as
well, and one can't be _everywhere_. This wants thinking about."

So he dived head downwards into the deepest recesses of my pocket and
abandoned himself to thought. A little later he came up with a smile....

Next morning I stayed in bed and the doctor came. Common looked over his
shoulder as he read the thermometer.

"A hundred and four," said Common. "Golly! I hope I haven't over-done
it."

He came with me to the clearing station.

"I only just blowed a germ at him," he said wistfully--"one I found in
his pocket. I only just blowed it at him."

We went down to the base hospital together; we went back to England. And
in the hospital in England Common suddenly saw