“Wot trenches—wot part?” he was asked, and when, innocently enough, he named a part that for years has had the reputation of a Quaker Sunday School for peacefulness, a smile flickered round. The deputy saw the smile. He felt uneasy; things weren’t going right; there wasn’t the eager welcome, the anxious questions after labour conditions and so on he had expected. So he lifted his voice again and talked. He was a good talker, which perhaps was the reason he was a chosen deputy. But he didn’t hold the room. Some listened, others resumed their own chat, others went on with the business of the evening, the drinking of thin beer. When he had finished the other man spoke, with even less success. There is some excuse for this. You cannot quite expect men who have been working like niggers under the filthiest possible conditions of wet and mud, weather and squalor, have been living and working, sleeping and eating, with sudden and violent death at their very elbows, to come straight out of their own inferno and be in any way deeply interested in abstract conditions of Labour at Home, or to be greatly sympathetic to the tea-and-butter shortage troubles of men who are earning good money, working in comfortable shops, and living in their own homes. The men were much more interested in affairs in France. “Wot’s the idea anyway?” asked one man. “Wot’s the good o’ this tour business?” “We’ve come to see the facks,” said a deputy. “See ’em for ourselves, and go back home to tell ’em in the shops what you chaps is doing.” “Wish they’d let some of us swap places wi’ them in the shops,” was the answer. “I’d tell ’em something, an’ they’d learn a bit too, doin’ my job here.” “The workers, Labour, wants to know,” went on the deputy, ignoring this. “Some says finish the war, and some says get on with it, and——” “Which are you doing?” came in swift reply, and “How many is on this deputation job?” “There’s three hundred a week coming out,” said the deputy with a touch of pride, “and——” “Three hundred!” said a loud voice at the back of the room. “Blimey, that’s boat an’ train room for three ’undred a week the less o’ us to go on leaf.” The talk drifted off amongst the men themselves again, but the deputation caught snatches of it. “Same ol’ game as ol’ Blank did ... we’ll see their names in the papers makin’ speeches when they’re home ... wearin’ a tin ’at an’ a gas-mask an’ bein’ warned to keep their ’eads down cos this is the front line—at Vale-o’-tears. Oh Lord!”... “Square the Quarter-bloke an’ take the shrap helmet home as a souvenir to hang over the mantel——” (Here a listening deputy blushed faintly and hastily renounced a long-cherished secret idea.) “Will this trip entitle ’em to a war medal?” “Lord ’elp the one of ’em I meets wearing a medal that they gets for a week where they’re goin’, an’ that I’ve took years to earn, where we come from.”