ccurred in
connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was
slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a
temporary madness that possessed the author of this escapade, for he had
no possible chance of escape. It was pleaded on his behalf, on his
appearance before the Colonel, that he had recently done a gallant deed,
but as some one said, 'If every man who did a gallant deed was allowed
to kill a pig there would not be a pig left in Flanders.'

It was the cleanness of the air and of the soil that made a rest back
among the far-stretching forests of the Pas de Calais so different from
one nearer the line. To get on bridle-paths and roads free from lorry
traffic and let your horse out at full stretch over the fallen leaves
down some long grey-purple vista of bare trees, and feel the clean wind
whistling past your ears and smell the fresh odours of the great woods,
to see the blue smoke drifting up from some forester's cottage, or for a
moment in passing catch a glimpse of a fairy-story scene of charcoal
burners grouped together in a glade, was to ride into another world of
thought and feeling. My little horse John, one of the five horses left
of those who crossed with the battalion, felt it too--thought perhaps he
was in old England again. But the British soldier hates manoeuvres and
marches and drills and inspections. He would rather be left in peace in
his trenches, in a 'quiet' part of the line at least, than bothered
about those things. Movement, too, has an exhilarating effect on him,
and so when orders come to go back into action he tramps off with
remarkable goodwill. I remember one battalion of Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
suddenly rushed up from rest, pulled out of the station singing a song
of which the refrain is something like 'Ai, ai! Vot a game it is!' at
the top of their voices. And it really is by no means a game. As the
Colonel used to say (very moderately), 'Life out here is not all joy!'

One November evening I was picking my way cautiously through the mud
camp near Reninghelst, and hearing the tune of a famous hymn, drew near
to listen, for Jock sometimes sings to hymn tunes words that certainly
never appeared in any hymn-book, and I wanted to make sure that it _was_
the greatest hymn in the English language which was being sung. It was a
quiet night. Now and again a heavy gun fired a round, and infrequently,
on a gentle wind blowing from the trenches, was borne the