"The captain might as well take a spell as not. . . . We're through with all the men except the Canadian Railway batch, and they can't be issued with blankets not for half an hour . . . not for three-quarters. If then! It depends if our runner can find where Quarter's lance-corporal is having his supper, to issue them. . . ." The sergeant-major had inserted that last speech deftly. The Staff officer, with a vague reminiscence of his regimental days, exclaimed: "Damn it! . . . I wonder you don't break into the depot blanket store and take what you want. . . ." The sergeant-major, becoming Simon Pure, exclaimed: "Oh, no, sir, we could never do that, sir. . . ." "But the confounded men are urgently needed in the line," Colonel Levin said. "Damn it, it's touch and go! . . . We're rushing . . ." He appreciated the fact again that he was on the gawdy Staff, and that the sergeant-major and Tietjens, playing like left backs into each other's hands, had trickily let him in. "We can only pray, sir," the sergeant-major said, "that these 'ere bloomin' 'Uns has got quartermasters and depots and issuing departments, same as ourselves." He lowered his voice into a husky whisper. "Besides, sir, there's a rumour . . . round the telephone in depot orderly room . . . that there's a W.O. order at 'Edquarters . . . countermanding this and other drafts. . . ." Colonel Levin said: "Oh, my God!" and consternation rushed upon both him and Tietjens. The frozen ditches, in the night, out there; the agonized waiting for men; the weight upon the mind like a weight upon the brows; the imminent sense of approaching unthinkableness on the right or the left, according as you looked up or down the trench; the solid protecting earth of the parapet then turns into pierced mist . . . and no reliefs coming from here. . . . The men up there thinking naïvely that they were coming, and they not coming. Why not? Good God, why not? Mackenzie said: "Poor ---- old Bird . . . His crowd had been in eleven weeks last Wednesday. . . . About all they could stick. . . ." "They'll have to stick a damn lot more," Colonel Levin said. "I'd like to get at some of the brutes. . . ." It was at that date the settled conviction of His Majesty's Expeditionary Force that the army in the field was the tool of politicians and civilians. In moments of routine that cloud dissipated itself lightly: when news of ill omen arrived it settled down again heavily like a cloud of black gas. You hung your head impotently. . . .