Page:No More Parades (Albert & Charles Boni).djvu/125

 house They were as eager as bullocks running down by Camden Town to Smithfield Market Seventy per cent. of them would never come back But it's better to go to heaven with your skin shining and master of your limbs than as a hulking lout The Almighty's orderly room will welcome you better in all probability He continued exclaiming monotonously "Remaining half-four and next four to the left Hold your beastly tongues when you fall out. I can't hear myself give orders" It lasted a long time. Then they were all swallowed up.

He staggered, his knees wooden-stiff with the cold, and the cold more intense now the wall of men no longer sheltered him from the wind, out along the brink of the plateau to the other lines. It gave him satisfaction to observe that he had got his men into their lines seventy-five per cent. quicker than the best of the N.C.O.'s who had had charge of the other lines. Nevertheless, he swore bitingly at the sergeants: their men were in knots round the entrance to the alleys of ghost-pyramids Then there were no more, and he drifted with regret across the plain towards his country street of huts. One of them had a coarse evergreen rose growing over it. He picked a leaf, pressed it to his lips and threw it up into the wind "That's for Valentine," he said meditatively. "Why did I do that Or perhaps it's for England" He said: "Damn it all, this is patriotism This is patriotism" It wasn't what you took patriotism as a rule to be. There were supposed to be more parades about that job But this was just a broke to the wide, wheezy, half-frozen Yorkshireman, who despised every one in England not a Yorkshireman, or