Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 5, 1917 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 42 pages of information about Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 5, 1917.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 5, 1917 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 42 pages of information about Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 5, 1917.

* * * * *

THE HUT.

As ordered, we marched the Battery to B 35d 45.25.  Reader, have you ever lived in, or on, an unfurnished map-reference in Flanders?  If not, permit me to inform you that this group of letters and numerals represented a mud-flat pocked with ancient shell-craters, through which loafed an unwholesome stream under a bilious-looking sky.  The Junior Subaltern, fresh from home, asked where the billets were.  We could but bless his happy innocence and remind him that as Army Field Artillery we were nobody’s children, the orphan bravoes of the Western Front, and that for us a bunch of map co-ordinates was considered ample provision.

The horses, having with proper pride sneered at the stream, were silenced with their nosebags, and then we asked our cook what about it?  That dauntless artist in bully-beef promptly brought our far-travelled mess-table into action in the open, and thus publicly we sat round it on our valises and drank Vichy water until the novelty palled.  Then the rain began and the men once more united in wishing themselves in Tennessee.

The Captain was now driven from the bosom of the mess to find a Camp Commandant, and to tell him, with the Major’s compliments, that even the personnel of Army Brigades were liable, in the words of the book, to deteriorate rapidly if unprotected from damp.  The officer, whom he found lurking in a neighbouring Nissen hut, was tall and stately, but admitted, under pressure, that to him was entrusted the stewardship of our mud-flat and the adjacent camps, and that he could give us a mess.  Through the insistent drizzle this person, smiling now very pleasantly, led us to a depressed wooden building that suggested a derelict Noah’s Ark with a sinister look about the windows.  The bad-tempered sky scowled between the planks of the roof; the querulous wind whined up through the floor; rats backed snarling into the corners on our entrance.

“This is the place,” said the C.C.  “You’ll soon make yourselves very comfortable.”

That night I dreamed I was a “U” boat, and started up, snorting, to find myself under a cascade, while the felt upon the roof banged and rasped and flapped.  It sounded as if the ark were trying to fly, but found its wings rusty.  At dawn we sent the Captain out, and refused him breakfast till by some resource of ingenuity or crime he obtained certain sausages of new felt.  These our fearless batmen unrolled and nailed upon the roof.  After his porridge we pushed him out again with a strong party under orders to carry the nearest R.E. dump by force or fraud, and secure large quantities of timber, nails, canvas and, if possible (the up-to-date R.E. dump secretes many unexpected commodities), Turkey carpets, wall-paper, sofa-cushions and bedroom-slippers.

The batmen were sent out with a limbered cart, some smoke shell and the total establishment of billhooks, and forbidden to return without sufficient material for bedsteads, window-shutters, bookshelves and chairs.  By evening the place began to feel habitable, and the C.C., when he looked in to borrow a horse, endeared himself to us all by his obvious pleasure in our comparative comfort.  We lent him the best horse in the battery.

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Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 5, 1917 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.