I was in the Army"--the Adjutant talks like this since he was attached
to the Flying Corps--"when I was in the Army there was a fellow who used to
come to the orderly-room and talk funerals to me until I was sick of the
sight of him. After some months of it I made him give me a written list of
all his surviving relations, and then as he killed them off I used to
scratch them out. I caught him at last on his third grandmother."

"That's all very nice," said the Stunt Pilot, "but the question at present
before the meeting is how are we poor beggars to get any leave?"

"It's no good blaming me," returned the Adjutant blandly. "Command Orders
are Command Orders."

There was a brief silence, and then the Stunt Pilot lifted up his voice and
spoke eloquently about the War Office and Brass Hats generally. He said
that they had hearts of granite and were strangers to all loving-kindness.
Their days were spent in idleness in the Metropolis (so said the Stunt
Pilot), while he and his fellows drove rotten 'buses for hours together
over the beastliest district in Europe. Of an evening the Carlton and the
Piccadilly, the Bing Boys and the Bing Girls, all the delights of London
were ready to their hands, while poor devils like himself, shorn of leave,
were condemned to languish in a moth-eaten Mess in the society of such
people as the Adjutant. Where was the sense in it, where the justice, and
when the deuce were they, any of them, going to get a chance at the
bath-room?

The Adjutant regarded him with amused pity.

"The fact of it is," he observed, "you people have been absolutely spoilt
over leave. When I was in the Infantry we used to consider three or four
days in six months quite handsome."

The Stunt Pilot inquired sarcastically whether he meant three or four days'
work or three or four days' leave.

"I don't mind saying," pursued the Adjutant, ignoring this sally, "at the
risk of making myself unpopular, that personally I think it's a very good
thing that leave _has_ been cut down. My own opinion is that in the past
there's been a lot too much leave flying about. Running up and down to
London on leave isn't going to help beat the Germans. What we've got to do
if we want to win this War is to--"

At this moment the C.O. entered and put down a hockey-stick in the corner.

"Thanks for the stick, Jervis," he said, and turned to go. "By the way,
shall I see you at the orderly-room tomorrow before you go? What train are
you