“Oh, that’s all right,” chaffed Stark; “we’ll take the three days off your next leave. I’m glad you’re back though. Purves, as acting Adjutant, does not shine. Morency’s at the waggon-lines. I’ve had to do most of the office-work myself. He’s out on the wires now. We’re commanding a ‘Group.’ If you get that map down, I’ll show you the battery-positions.” He indicated them. Doctor Carson came in, bumping his head on the lintel as usual; said “Hallo, P.J. Jolly spot, isn’t it? Time for lunch, I think.” Bombardier Michael appeared, carrying plates; followed by Peter’s batman Garton, with food from the tiny cook-house which Gunner Horne had found on a tottery foot-bridge over the creek. Somehow, in spite of discomforts, Peter was glad to be back. Lunch over, he explored along the creek; was shown the doctor’s dug-out (shared willy-nilly with Purves); clambered a little mud-slope; found the “office,” a steel tunnel let into the foundations of what must once have been a house, and the “telephone-room”—a sunk cellar. “I’ve put your bed in the office, sir,” announced Garton. “The room next to the Colonel’s leaks.” “Good lad,” said Peter, looking down, from the little mound, onto the desolation of “Wipers.” . . . In the months which followed, he grew to know that view as a bank-clerk knows Lombard Street. Below him, on his left, stretched the muddy waters of the Yser Canal, men living like water-rats all along its banks. On his right, stood the shattered lock-house beneath which slept Sergeant (once Corporal) Waller and the staff. In front of him, water lapped the stone quay of “Tattenham Corner,” with its tipsy blind lamp-posts, its twisted railings. For the rest, the panorama was just ruined houses, skeletons of houses, mockeries of homes: above them, jagged spires—broken dogs-teeth against winter skies. Sometimes at night, a blue, almost Whistlerian radiance brooded over this ghost of a city: but mostly blackness hid it—a blackness broken only by the silver of Véry lights, the orange of candle-flames in dug-outs, the crimson flash from a gun-muzzle. . . . § 2 It is owing to a higher capacity for adaptability that the human animal has defeated all the other animals on this planet; made himself in fact the “lord of creation.” For example, one need but take the Southdown Division during its winter in the “City of Fear.” Their life—from the front-line infantry, frozen blue or blown to bits between rotting sandbags, to the drivers in the swamped horse-lines where the dumb beasts stood all day, tail to storm, fetlock-deep in mud, and whence men and beasts sallied forth every night up that road of death between the scarred poplars—was indescribably foul, a reversion to conditions at which an aristocratic caveman might well have jibbed.