situation.  Moreover he had an insistent manner of delivering them which alone was sufficient to place him in a class by himself.  It was not long before many of his friends gave up trying altogether and let Private Thompson do it all for them.  It is even rumoured that on occasions men in distant parts of the line would send for him so that he might come and give adequate expression to feelings which they felt to be beyond their range.

To show you the extent of his fame, it is only necessary to mention that Lieutenant ——­ composed an ode all about Private Thompson and got it published in Camouflage, the trench gazette of the Nth Division.  Two of the verses went, as far as I can remember, something like this:—­

  As Private Thompson used to say,
    He couldn’t stand the War;
  He cursed about it every day
    And every night he swore;
  And, while a sense of discipline
  Carried him on through thick and thin,
  The mud, the shells, the cold, the din
    Annoyed him more and more.

  The words with which we others cursed
    Seemed mild and harmless quips
  Compared to those remarks that burst
    From Private Thompson’s lips;
  Haven’t you ever heard about
  The Prussian Guard at X Redoubt,
  How Thompson’s language laid them out
    Before we came to grips?

Anyhow, after bespattering the air of France and Flanders with a barrage of anathemas for the best part of a year, Private Thompson did something creditable in one of the pushes, and retired to a hospital in England, whence he emerged a few months later with a slight limp, a discharge certificate and a piece of coloured ribbon on his waistcoat.  Having expressed his opinion on hospital life, he returned to his native town.

His first shock was when he was met at the station by the local band and conducted up the Station Road and down the beflagged High Street to the accompaniment of martial and patriotic strains.  His second was when he was confronted at the steps of the Town Hall by the Mayor and an official gathering of the leading citizens, with an unofficial background of the led ones, and found himself the subject of speeches of adulation and welcome.

He was too dumbfounded to grasp all that was said, but he recovered his senses in time to hear the Mayor assuring his audience that it gave him great pleasure, indeed he might go so far as to say the very greatest pleasure, to welcome on behalf of their town one who had upheld with such distinction and bravery the reputation and honour of the community.  And that, although he did not wish to keep them any longer, yet he must just add that he was going to ask Mr. Thompson then and there, while the remembrance of his terrible hardships was still fresh in his mind, to impart them to a phonograph, so that the archives of the town might not lack direct evidence of the experiences, if he might so express it, of her bravest citizen, and future generations might know something of the noble thoughts that surged in so gallant a breast in times of danger, and the fine and honourable words with which those thoughts had been uttered.