ew
it on the table among the attentive Mess and snorted.

"Ha! A Cuthbert--a genuine shirker! I think some of you might oblige
the gentleman."

Then he stepped outside and went into the seventh edition of his
impressionist sketch, "Farmyard of a French Farm," with lots of
BBB pencil for the manure heap. He was a young C.O. and new to
the regiment.

The Mess "carried on" the conversation.

"_I'll_ write to the blighter," shouted the Junior Sub. "I'll be an
awf'lly 'interesting correspondent.'"

"And a brilliant one?" queried the Major.

"A Verey brilliant one, Sir," asserted the Sub., giving a sample.

"This sort of slacker," said the Senior Captain bitterly, as with
infinite toil he scraped the last of the glaze from the inside of
the marmalade pot, "is the sort that doesn't realise that there's
a war on."

"Don't you make any mistake," said the Major, "_he_ knows, poor devil!
I'm going to write to him and say, 'When I think of the incessant
strain of the trench warfare carried on with inadequate support by
you civilians of military age against the repeated brutal attacks of
tribunals, I marvel at the indomitable pluck you display. In your
place I should simply jack it up, plead ill-health and get into
the Army."

"I've got an idea," said the Junior Sub., joyously.

"Consolidate it quickly," said the Adjutant, "and prepare to receive
counter-attacks. Yes?"

"I've never yet been allowed to explain _my_ side of that confounded
affair of the revetments. I'll tell it all to Cuthbert. _He_'ll
sympathise with me. I'll tell him all that the C.O. said and all that
I should have _liked_ to say to the C.O. To pour out one's troubles
into a travelled literary bosom--what a relief!"

"That's rather an idea," said the Senior Captain. "I nurse a private
grief of my own beneath a camouflage of--of persiflage. I think I
shall ask Cuthbert's opinion, as an artist, of a brother artist who
himself does perfectly unrecognisable sketches of farm-yards"--he
waved a golden-syrup spoon towards the Colonel and the
manure-heap--"and yet demands a finnicking and altogether contemptible
realism in the matter of trench maps. Pass the honey, please."

"It seems to me," said the Major reflectively as he rose from table,
"that 'Artist, 33, literary, travelled, mentally isolated' (one) is
going to be buried beneath the weight of the world's grievances--or
the grievances of this battalion, at any rate."

"It's the same thing," observ