"I've been everything," he replied, employing his little finger in the removal of cigarette ash. "My ole man apprenticed me to a marker of 'ot cross buns, but I 'ad a 'abit of makin' the long end of the cross on the short side, an' got chucked out. Then I learned 'ow to jump through tin plates in order to make them nutmeg graters, but left that job after sticking plump in the middle of a plate. I had to stop there for three days without food or drink. They were thinnin' me out, see! Then I was a draughts manager at a bank, and shut the ventilators; after that I was an electric mechanic; I switched the lights on and off at night and mornin'; now I'm a professional gambler, I lose all my tin." "You're also a soldier," I said. "Course, I am," Bill replied. "I can present hipes by numbers, and knock the guts out of sandbags at five hundred yards." II--A NIGHT MARCH IN THE RAIN We did not leave the village until eight o'clock. It was now very dark and had begun to rain, not real rain, but a thin drizzle which mixed up with the flashes of guns, the glow of star-shells, the long tremulous glimmer of flashlights, the blood red blaze of haystacks afire near Givenchy, threw a sombre haze over our line of march. Even through the haze, star-shells showed brilliant in their many different colours, red, green, and electric white. The French send up a beautiful light which bursts into four different flames that burn standing high in mid-air for five minutes; another, a parachute star, holds the sky for three minutes, and almost blots its more remote sisters from the heavens. The English and the Germans are content to fling rockets across and observe one another's lines while these flare out their brief meteoric life. The firing-line was about five miles away; the star-lights seemed to rise and fall just beyond an adjacent spinney, so deceptive are they. Part of our journey ran along the bank of a canal; there had been some heavy fighting the night previous, and the wounded were still coming down by barges, only those who are badly hurt come this way, the less serious cases go by motor ambulance from dressing station to hospital--those who are damaged slightly in arm or head generally walk. Here we encountered a party of men marching in single file with rifles, skeleton equipment, picks and shovels. In the dark it was impossible to distinguish the regimental badge. "Oo are yer?" asked Bill, who, like a good many more of us, was smoking a cigarette contrary to orders. "The Camberwell Gurkhas," came the answer. "Oo are yer?" "The Chelesa Cherubs," said Bill. "Up workin'?" "Doin' a bit between the lines," answered one of the working party. "Got bombed out and were sent back." "Lucky dogs, goin' back for a kip (sleep)." "'Ad two killed and seven wounded." "Blimey!" "Good luck, boys," said the disappearing file as the darkness swallowed up the working party.