lime. On my way to the dugout, to fetch my revolver and attend the twilight ceremony of stand-to and rifle inspection, I heard the voice of Flook; just round a bend of the support trench he was asking one of the company bombers if he’d seen his officer-bloke go along that way. Flook was in a hurry to tell me that I was to go on leave. I didn’t wait to inspect my platoon’s rifles, and not many minutes later I was on my way down the Old Kent Road trench. Maple Redoubt was getting its usual evening bombardment, and as a man had been killed by a whizzbang in the Old Kent Road a few minutes earlier, I was glad when I was riding back to Morlancourt with Dottrell; glad, too, to be driving to Mericourt station behind the sluggish pony next morning; to hear the mellow bells of Rouen on the evening air while the leave train stood still for half an hour before making up its mind to lumber on to Havre. And thus the gradations of thankfulness continued, until I found myself in a quiet house in Kensington where I was staying the night with an old friend of Aunt Evelyn’s.
To be there, on a fine Sunday evening in June, with the drawing-room windows open and someone playing the piano next door, was an experience which now seemed as queer as the unnatural conditions I had returned from. Books, pictures, furniture, all seemed kind and permanent and unrelated to the present time and its troubles. I felt detached from my surroundings—rather as if I were in a doctor’s waiting-room, expecting to be informed that I had some incurable disease. The sound of the piano suggested that the specialist had a happy home life of his own, but it had no connection with my coming and going. A sense of gentle security pervaded the room; but I could no longer call my life my own. The pensive music had caught me off my guard; I was only an intruder from the Western Front. But the room contained one object which unexpectedly reminded me of the trenches—a silent canary in a cage. I had seen canaries in cages being carried by the men of the tunnelling company when they emerged from their mine-galleries.