The bath was amusing. The doors were being closed as we arrived, and I had just the time to stick my foot in the crack, much to the annoyance of the attendant. I blarneyed him in French and at last pushed into the hall only to be greeted by a cry of indignation from the lady in charge of the ticket office. She was young, however and pretty, and, determined to get a bath, I played upon her feelings to the extent of my vocabulary. At first she was adamant. The baths were closed. I pointed out that the next morning we were going to the front to fight for France. She refused to believe it. I asked her if she had a brother. She said she hadn’t. I congratulated her on not being agonized by the possibilities of his death from hour to hour. She smiled. My heart leaped with hope and I reminded her that as we were possibly going to die for her the least she could do was to let us die clean. She looked me straight in the eye. There was a twinkle in hers. “You will not die,” she said. Somehow one doesn’t associate the selling of bath tickets with the calling of prophet. But she combined the two. And the bath was gloriously hot. 15 That nine days at La Bruyère did not teach us very much,--not even the realization of the vital necessity of patience. We looked upon each day as wasted because we weren’t up the line. Everywhere were preparations of war but we yearned for the sound of guns. Even the blue-clad figures who exchanged jokes with us over the hospital railing conveyed nothing of the grim tragedy of which we were only on the fringe. They were mostly convalescent. It is only the shattered who are being pulled back to life by a thread who make one curse the war. We looked about like new boys in a school, interested but knowing nothing of the workings, reading none of the signs. This all bored us. We wanted the line with all the persistence of the completely ignorant. The morning after our bath we got it. There was much bustle and running and cursing and finally we had our saddles packed, and a day’s rations in our haversacks and a double feed in the nose-bags. The cavalry man in full marching order bears a strange resemblance to a travelling ironmonger and rattles like the banging of old tins. The small man has almost to climb up the near foreleg of his horse, so impossible is it to get a leg anywhere near the stirrup iron with all his gear on. My own method was to stick the lance in the ground by the butt, climb with infinite labour and heavings into the saddle and come back for the lance when arranged squarely on the horse.