With David it is otherwise. David is a big strong man. He blew into my dug-out late one night and occupied the other bed--an affair of rude beams and hard wire-netting. He spread himself there in sleep, and silence fell. At dawn next morning an awful sound hurled me out of dreams towards my revolver. I clutched it in sweating terror, and stared round the dug-out with my heart going like a machine-gun. It was not, however, a Hun counter-attack. It was David calling for his servant. As the first ray of the sun lights the Eastern sky David calls for his servant. His servant is a North-countryman. Sleeping far off in some noxious haunt, he hears David's voice and instantly begins to speak. His voice comes swelling towards us, talking of boots and tunics. As he reaches the dug-out door he becomes deafening. He and David have a shouting match. He kicks over a petrol-tin full of water, smashes my shaving mirror, and sits on my feet while picking up the bits. Meanwhile David is standing on his bed and jodelling, while his batman shrieks to him that his wife said in her last letter to him that if he doesn't get a leaf soon the home'll be bruk up. Then David starts slapping soap on to his face like a bill-sticker with a paste-brush. His servant drops a field boot on to my stomach, trips over an empty biscuit-tin and is heard grooming a boot without. David now strops his razor. It is one of those self-binding safety razors which is all covered with cog-wheels and steam-gauges and levers and valves. You feed the strop into it like paper into a printing-press, and it eats up the leather as low people eat spaghetti, making all the time a noise like a mowing-machine. David loves that. He whistles gay tunes while it happens. He whistles while he shaves. He cannot whistle while brushing his teeth, but he brushes his teeth as a man might wash down a cab in a large yard with plenty of room. The moment it is over he whistles again. Then he does deep breathing at the door of the dug-out. (Aeroplanes passing overhead have had narrow escapes from being dragged into the dug-out by sheer power of suction, when David deep-breathes.) Then he does muscle exercises. He crooks his finger and from behind you see a muscle like a mushroom get up suddenly in the small of his back, run up his spine and hit him under the left ear. Meanwhile he is whistling, and his batman is making sparks fly out of the buttons, which he cleans with glass-paper and gun-cotton just outside the door. At eight, when I get carefully out of bed, David is beginning to don his shirt. At nine we move together towards breakfast. I am training David to say "Rah! Rah!" against the day when he and General ROOSEVELT meet in a communication trench. I am sure they will take to each other at once. * * * * * [Illustration: _Basil_. "MOTHER, I THINK SATAN MUST BE ABOUT." _Mother_. "WHY, DEAR?" _Basil_. "ISN'T IT SATAN THAT MAKES VERY GOOD PEOPLE FEEL BAD?"