“No more prisoners?” I asked the company sergeant-major.
“No more prisoners, sir,” he answered. I then rather hurriedly signed several returns made out by Sergeant Roberts, the company quartermaster-sergeant, and promised to come in later and sign the acquittance rolls. These are the pay-lists, made out in triplicate, which are signed by each man as he draws his pay. The original goes to the Paymaster in England, one carbon copy to the adjutant, and one is retained by the company-commander. We had paid out the first day in billets. This time “working-parties” had been tolerable. We had arrived back in billets about half-past three in the afternoon; the next morning had been spent in a march to the divisional baths at Treux (two miles away), in cleaning up, kit-inspection, and a little arm-drill and musketry practice; in the afternoon we paid out. Then followed three days of working-parties, up on the support line at Crawley Ridge; and now, we had this last day in which to do a little company work. There had been running parade at seven-thirty. Owen had taken this, and I confess that I had not yet breakfasted. So I hurried off now at 9.10 to gulp something down and be at battalion orderly-room at 9.30 sharp.
The company office was a house of two rooms; one was the “office” itself, with a blanket-clad table and a couple of chairs in the middle, and all around were strewn strange boxes, and bundles of papers and equipment. On the walls were pictures from illustrated English papers; one of Nurse Cavell, another of howitzers firing; and several graphic bayonet-charges at Verdun, pictured by an artist who must have “glowed” as he drew them in his room in Chelsea. In the other room slept the C.S.M. and C.Q.M.S. (more familiar as the “sergeant-major” and the “quartermaster”).
From this house, then, I stepped out into the glaring street. It was the end of May, and the day promised to be really quite hot. I have already explained how completely shut off from the trenches one felt in Morlancourt, sheltered as it was in a cup of the hills and immune from shelling. Now as I walked quickly along the street, past our battalion “orderly-room,” and returned the immaculate salute of Sergeant-Major Shandon, the regimental sergeant-major, who was already marshalling the prisoners ready for the Colonel at half-past nine, I felt a lightness and freshness of body that almost made me think I was free of the war at last. My Sam Browne belt, my best tunic with its polished buttons, and most of all, I suppose, the effect of a good sleep and a cold bath, all contributed to this feeling, as well as the scent from the laburnum and lilac that looked over the garden wall opposite the billet that was our “Mess.”