were putting the finishing touches to their makeup with bits of burnt cork. Showing the whites of their eyes and pretending not to recognize one another, those twenty-five shiny faced nigger minstrels might almost have been getting ready for a concert. Everyone seemed to expect the entertainment to be a roaring success. But there were no looking-glasses or banjos, and they were brandishing knobkerries, stuffing Mills bombs into their pockets and hatchets into their belts, and “Who’s for a Blighty one tonight?” was the stock joke (if such a well worn wish could be called a joke).
At 10:30 there was a sudden silence, and Barton told me to take the party up to Battalion Headquarters. It surprises me when I remember that I set off without having had a drink, but I have always disliked the flavour of whisky, and in those days the helpfulness of alcohol in human affairs was a fact which had not yet been brought home to me. The raiders had been given only a small quantity, but it was enough to hearten them as they sploshed up the communication trench. None of us could know how insignificant we were in the so-called “Great Adventure” which was sending up its uneasy flares along the Western Front. No doubt we thought ourselves something very special. But what we thought never mattered; nor does it matter what sort of an inflated fool I was when I blundered into Kinjack’s Headquarters at Maple Redoubt to report the presence of the raiders and ask whether I might go across with them. “Certainly not,” said the Colonel, “your job is to stop in our trench and count the men as they come back.” He spoke with emphasis and he was not a man who expected to have to say a thing twice. We stared at one another for a moment; some freak of my brain made me remember that in peacetime he had been an enthusiastic rose grower—had won prizes with his roses, in fact; for he was a married man and had lived in a little house near the barracks.
My thought was nipped in the bud by his peremptory voice telling Major Robson, his second-in-command, to push off with the party. We were