"Then give her my love. Doggie Trevor's love," said Doggie, and marched away through the groups of men.
At the entrance to the barn he fell in with Phineas and Mo.
"Laddie," said the former, "although I meant it at the time as a testimony of my affection, I've been thinking that what I said to the young leddy may not have been over-tactful."
"It was taking it too much for granted," explained Mo, "that you and her were sort of keeping company."
"You're a pair of idiots," said Doggie, sitting down between them, and taking out his pink packet of Caporal. "Have a cigarette?"
"Not if I wos dying of----Look 'ere," said Mo, with the light on his face of the earnest seeker after Truth. "If a chap ain't got no food, he's dying of 'unger. If he ain't got no drink, he's dying of thirst. What the 'ell is he dying of if he ain't got no tobakker?"
"Army Service Corps," said Phineas, pulling out his pipe.
It was dark when A Company marched away. Doggie had seen nothing more of Jeanne. He was just a little disappointed; for she had promised. He could not associate her with light words. Yet perhaps she had kept her promise. She had said "_Je vous verrai._" She had not undertaken to exhibit herself to him. He derived comfort from the thought. There was, indeed, something delicate and subtle and enchanting in the notion. As on the previous day, the fine weather had changed with the night and a fine rain was falling. Doggie, an indistinguishable pack-laden ant in the middle of the four-abreast ribbon of similar pack-laden ants, tramped on in silence, thinking his own thoughts. A regiment going back to the trenches in the night is, from the point of view of the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, a very lugubrious procession. The sight of it would have hurt an old-time poet. An experienced regiment has no lovely illusions. It knows what it is going to, and the knowledge makes it serious. It would much rather be in bed or on snug straw than plodding through the rain to four days and nights of eternal mud and stinking high-explosive shell. It sets its teeth and is a very stern, silent, ugly conglomeration of men.
"---- (_the adjective_) night," growled Doggie's right-hand neighbour.
"---- (_the adjective_)" Doggie responded mechanically.