[Sidenote:  THE PRUDENT SERGEANT]

But the point of telling you of this episode is that meanwhile it was getting time for the post to go.  Prudent Sergeant Marsden (Orderly Room sergeant) observed that I hadn’t addressed the letter yet or signed it outside.  So he did it himself!  “You very seldom write any letters to other addresses, you see, sir, so I thought I’d better address it myself.  I thought it would be inadvisable to miss a post, and I thought the young lady would forward it on if it was not for her!”

It made me laugh as I haven’t laughed for a long time.  Wasn’t it nice and thoughtful.  He tells me he duly forged my signature in the left-hand bottom corner.

Jorrocks sends his love.  “Your little filly” he always calls you.

November 29.

About leave.  There’s no more chance of it at present, I think, as we are going up to the line again in a week or two, and we want to work off all the men, who haven’t had any leave at all, before moving up mudwards, when all leave will be stopped.  We are engaged at present in practically rebuilding and making sanitary an entire French village, and in “training,” which means all the old dismal tedium of manoeuvres plus spit and polish.

These villages are most amazingly ill-built.  Swallow this morning lashed out on being bitten by Jezebel, and (dear silly Swallow!) instead of hitting Jezebel, she brought down half the wall of the shed in which they live, which frightened her to such an extent, Hunt tells me, that she allowed Jezebel to eat all her food at midday stables.

November 30.

We move next week, I think, or possibly the week after.

We are not going back to quite the same part of the line, but near it. 
It will be new country to me altogether, and to everyone else concerned.

Poor Swallow, poor Jezebel, poor Tank, I’d give anything to shelter you three; but, alas!  I fear you are going to have a nasty time of it now.  All clipped, too.  It’s Swallow particularly that I tremble for.  He does so throw up the sponge.  Tank copies Bird in everything, so she ought to pull through all right.

December 1.

[Sidenote:  AMIENS CATHEDRAL]

All leave is cancelled again, at any rate in this army—­possibly on account of the move, possibly on account of nasty fish in the sea.  However, the telegram says “until further notice,” which usually means for a short time only.  Not that it affects me, but it’s bad luck on some of the men who were just off.

Now about Xmas.  I have got a new crop, thank you ever so much, that I bought at a town near here.

A beautiful cathedral town.

With doors all padded up with sand-bags, the great cathedral towers above the town, and is seen for miles and miles.  A good effort.  What fun they must have had building it.  What they believed then they expressed in outward and visible form.  What we think now is (or ought to be) very different indeed from what they thought then.  But I can’t remember having ever seen anything that begins to express what we think (or ought to think) now.