gh duties and exercises that were only too
obviously a means of preventing our discovering just how much waiting
about we were doing. I suppose there is no great harm in describing the
place I am in here; it's a kind of scenery that is somehow all of a
piece with the life we lead day by day. It is a village that has been
only partly smashed up; it has never been fought through, indeed the
Germans were never within two miles of it, but it was shelled
intermittently for months before we made our advance. Almost all the
houses are still standing, but there is not a window left with a square
foot of glass in the place. One or two houses have been burnt out, and
one or two are just as though they had been kicked to pieces by a
lunatic giant. We sleep in batches of four or five on the floors of the
rooms; there are very few inhabitants about, but the village inn still
goes on. It has one poor weary billiard-table, very small with very big
balls, and the cues are without tops; it is The Amusement of the place.
Ortheris does miracles at it. When he leaves the army he says he's going
to be a marker, 'a b----y marker.' The country about us is
flat--featureless--desolate. How I long for hills, even for Essex mud
hills. Then the road runs on towards the front, a brick road frightfully
worn, lined with poplars. Just at the end of the village mechanical
transport ends and there is a kind of depot from which all the stuff
goes up by mules or men or bicycles to the trenches. It is the only
movement in the place, and I have spent hours watching men shift grub or
ammunition or lending them a hand. All day one hears guns, a kind of
thud at the stomach, and now and then one sees an aeroplane, very high
and small. Just beyond this point there is a group of poplars which have
been punished by a German shell. They are broken off and splintered in
the most astonishing way; all split and ravelled out like the end of a
cane that has been broken and twisted to get the ends apart. The choice
of one's leisure is to watch the A.S.C. or play football, twenty a side,
or sit about indoors, or stand in the doorway, or walk down to the
Estaminet and wait five or six deep for the billiard-table. Ultimately
one sits. And so you get these unconscionable letters."

"Unconscionable," said Mr. Britling. "Of course--he will grow out of
that sort of thing.

"And he'll write some day, sure enough. He'll write."

He went on reading the letter.

"We read, of co