The mess harbours the O.C. of a mobile laboratory. He moves between the hospitals within the Army testing serums. He wears the peering aspect of a man accustomed to microscopic examination. All his table conversation is of an inquiring nature--better, an investigatory nature--into matters that are quite impersonal. During a whole meal he will talk of nothing but the Northern Territory of Australia or the structure of the Great Barrier Reef on the Queensland coast. If he's talking of the Reef he deals in a series of questions and in an examination of your answers thereto, until he has built up for himself--with the aid of diagrams contrived with table implements and slabs of bread--an accurate notion of the surface structure. He's as much interested in modern history as in science. One evening he edified the mess, by arrangement, with an hour's discourse on the causes leading up to the American Civil War. For this he prepared with academic care. It was curious to see how he could, for an hour, sustain the interest of the mess in so remote and comparatively insignificant a struggle, when that mess was stationed in the heart of the Somme at the height of the push.... His laboratory walls were decorated with pictures by no means scientific, and yet physiological. They are extracted from _La Vie Parisienne_, a French weekly illustrated journal of extraordinary frankness. But in this man there is nothing lewd. But he has an unusual appreciation of French cleverness; and that is a faculty alarmingly wanting in the normal English officer. French drawings, which the English call lewd are by no means lewd: merely intensely clever. They convey no notion of lewdness to the French mind. But the English, except in the case of isolated representatives of that race, will never understand the French--in other matters than that of art. So great is the gulf of miscomprehension fixed between the French and English that it becomes a daily deepening mystery how they could ever have found themselves Allies. Still more mysterious is it that they should continue so.... These are the men who impress you most in the mess. There's Wallace, the Scotchman who never says more than he's obliged, but has the tender heart with his patients. He always trembles when giving the anæsthetic in critical cases. He calls himself weak-kneed for it, and reviles himself unmercifully for a womanish fellow (he's intensely masculine); but he can't help it. There's Thompson, another Scotchman (the mess is fairly infested with Scots) who is dental surgeon. His gift is disconcerting repartee, with which he occasionally routs the C.O.