It was in a big chateau that I heard the story—­a story characteristic of modern warfare at its highest pitch—­and felt its thrill when told by the tongues of its participants.  There were twenty bedrooms in that chateau.  If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four.  As for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas of immersion.  A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you pleased.  Some bathroom, that!

For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat’s before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough.  Ask the generals in whose command they have served if you have any doubts.  There is one way to win praise at the front:  by fighting.  The P.P.s knew the way.

“Too bad Gault is not here.  He’s in England recovering from his wound.  Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs.  All day in that trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm.  God!  How he was suffering!  But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.

“Buller away, too.  He was the second in command.  Gault succeeded him.  Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show—­piece of shell in the eye.”

“And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach.  How we miss him!  If ever there were a ‘live-wire’ it’s Charlie.  Up or down, he’s smiling and ready for the next adventure.  Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver.  The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn’t washing them long.  Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson Bay Company.  His Indians got sick.  He wouldn’t desert them, and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders.  But you have heard such stories from the North-West before.  Being shot through the stomach the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die.  It was like Charlie to disagree with them.  He always had his own point of view.  So he is getting well.  Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War.  He said that it would bring him luck.”

The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th.  On the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres, the “gas battle,” were ordered forward to a new line to the south-east of Ypres.  To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.