Some snuffling R.A.M.C. orderlies bore him tenderly to a tent and a doctor entered, also snuffling. MacTavish is of the opinion that the whole of the medical staff had P.U.O., and the doctor was the sickest of the lot and far from reliable. At all events, on seeing MacTavish's face, he ejaculated a bronchial "Good Lord!" and tearing MacTavish's tunic open, stuck a trumpet against his tummy and listened for the ticks. Apparently he heard something sensational, for he wheezed another "Good Lord!" and decorated MacTavish with a scarlet label. Within an hour our hero found himself on board a Red Cross train _en route_ for the coast. There were a lot of cheerful wounded on the bus, getting all the soup and jelly they wanted; but MacTavish got only lukewarm milk and precious little of that. From scraps of hushed conversation he caught here and there he gathered that his life hung by a thread. He was feeling very bewildered and depressed, he said, but, remembering his duty to the Skipper, played the game and kept body and soul together on drips of jelly surreptitiously begged from the cheerful wounded. Next morning he found himself in hospital in England, where he still remains. He says he has been promoted from warm milk to cold slops, but is still liable to die at any moment, he understands. He has discovered that he was sent home with "galloping heart disease," but nobody in the hospital can get even a trot out of it, and boards of learned physicians sit on him all day long, their trumpets planted on his tummy listening for the ticks. MacTavish says he thinks it improbable that they ever will hear any ticks now, for the excellent reason that he threw the cause thereof--my "Pretty Polly," to wit--out of the window the day he arrived. In a postscript he adds that he considers he has played the game far enough, and that if the Skipper doesn't come and bail him out soon he'll bite the learned physicians, kiss the nurses, sing "My Friend John" and disgrace the Regiment for ever. XXX THE HARRIERS (I) The Boche having lately done a retreat--"strategic retirement," "tactical adjustment," "elastic evasion," or whatever Ludendorff is calling it this week--in plain words the Boche, having gloriously trotted backwards off a certain slice of France, Albert Edward and I found ourselves attached to a Corps H.Q. operating in a wilderness of grass-grown fields, ruined villages and smoking châteaux. One evening Albert Edward loitered up to the hen-house I was occupying at the time and chatted to me through the wires as I shaved. "Put up seventeen hares and ten covey of partridges visiting outposts to-day--take my advice and scrap that moustache while you're about it, it must be a heavy drain on your system--and twenty hares and four covey riding home. Do you find lathering the ears improves their growth, or what?"