Colonel Flowers would sit smiling behind his hand, and would try his hardest to find “mitigating circumstances”; but when none could be dug out he passed sentence with the last limit of severity, and the man that was up for orders didn’t come again if he knew what was good for himself.

I think that on the hike we all got to know our officers better than we had known them in the trenches.  Their real characters came out.  You knew how far you could go with them, and what was more important, how far you couldn’t go.

It was at Dieval that my rank as lance corporal was confirmed.  It is customary, when a rookie has been made a non-com in training, to reduce him immediately when he gets to France.  I had joined in the trenches and had volunteered for a raiding party and there had been no opportunity to reduce me.  I had not, however, had a corporal’s pay.  My confirmation came at Dieval, and I was put on pay.  I would have willingly sacrificed the pay and the so-called honor to have been a private.

Our routine throughout the hike was always about the same, that is in the intervals when we were in any one place for a day or more.  It was, up at six, breakfast of tea, bread, and bacon.  Drill till noon; dinner; drill till five.  After that nothing to do till to-morrow, unless we got night ’ops, which was about two nights out of three.

There were few Y.M.C.A. huts so far behind the lines, and the short time up to nine was usually spent in the estaminets.  The games of house were in full blast all the time.

On the hike we were paid weekly.  Privates got five francs, corporals ten, and sergeants fifteen to twenty a week.  That’s a lot of money.  Anything left over was held back to be paid when we got to Blighty.  Parcels and mail came along with perfect regularity on that hike.  It was and is a marvel to me how they do it.  A battalion chasing around all over the place gets its stuff from Blighty day after day, right on the tick and without any question.  I only hope that whatever the system is, our army will take advantage of it.  A shortage of letters and luxury parcels is a real hardship.

We finally brought up at a place called Oneux (pronounced Oh, no) and were there five days.  I fell into luck here.  It was customary, when we were marching on some unsuspecting village, to send the quartermaster sergeants ahead on bicycles to locate billets.  We had an old granny named Cypress, better known as Lizzie.  The other sergeants were accustomed to flim-flam Lizzie to a finish on the selection of billets, with the result that C company usually slept in pigpens of stables.

The day we approached Oneux, Lizzie was sick, and I was delegated to his job.  I went into the town with the three other quartermaster sergeants, got them into an estaminet, bought about a dollar’s worth of drinks, sneaked out the back door, and preempted the schoolhouse for C company.  I also took the house next door, which was big and clean, for the officers.  We were royally comfortable there, and the other companies used the stables that usually fell to our lot.