They tell me that I will be for home service after this.  My head is doing well, but the muscules of my right leg is badly torn.  I should have liked fine for to have stayed out and come home with the other boys when we are through with Berlin.

Having no more to say, sir, I will now draw to a close.

Jas. Mucklewame,

C.S.M_.

After the perusal of this characteristic Ave atque Vale! the two friends adjourned to the balcony, overlooking the Green Park.  Here they lit their cigars in reminiscent silence, while neighbouring search-lights raked the horizon for Zeppelins which no longer came.  It was a moment for confidences.

“Old Mucklewame is like the rest of us,” said Wagstaffe at last.

“How?”

“Wanting to go back, and all that.  I do too—­just because I’m here, I suppose.  A year ago, out there, my chief ambition was to get home, with a comfortable wound and a comfortable conscience.”

“Same here,” admitted Bobby.

“It was the same with practically every one,” said Wagstaffe.  “If any man asserts that he really enjoys modern warfare, after, say, six months of it, he is a liar.  In the South African show I can honestly say I was perfectly happy.  We were fighting in open country, against an adversary who was a gentleman; and although there was plenty of risk, the chances were that one came through all right.  At any rate, there was no poison gas, and one did not see a whole platoon blown to pieces, or buried alive, by a single shell.  If Brother Boer took you prisoner, he did not stick you in the stomach with a saw-edged bayonet.  At the worst he pinched your trousers.  But Brother Boche is a different proposition.  Since he butted in, war has descended in the social scale.  And modern scientific developments have turned a sporting chance of being scuppered into a mathematical certainty.  And yet—­and yet—­old Mucklewame is right.  One hates to be out of it—­especially at the finish.  When the regiment comes stumping through London on its way back to Euston—­next year, or whenever it’s going to be—­with their ragged pipers leading the way, you would like to be at the head of ‘A’ Company, Bobby, and I would give something to be exercising my old function of whipper-in.  Eh, boy?”

“Never mind,” said practical Bobby.  “Perhaps we shall be on somebody’s glittering Staff.  What I hate to feel at present is that the other fellows, out there, have got to go on sticking it, while we—­”

“And by God,” exclaimed Wagstaffe, “what stickers they are—­and were!  Did you ever see anything so splendid, Bobby, as those six-months-old soldiers of ours—­in the early days, I mean, when we held our trenches, week by week, under continuous bombardment, and our gunners behind could only help us with four or five rounds a day?”

“I never did,” said Bobby, truthfully.