II

Armed with Aunt Evelyn’s membership ticket (posted back to her afterwards) I had invaded the Army and Navy Stores and procured a superb salmon, two bottles of old brandy, an automatic pistol, and two pairs of wire-cutters with rubber-covered handles. The salmon was now my chief concern. I was concerned about its future freshness, for I had overstayed my leave by twenty-four hours. A rich restaurant dinner followed by a mechanical drawing-room comedy hadn’t made the risk of Kinjack’s displeasure seem worth while; but I felt that the salmon spelt safety at Battalion Headquarters. Probably the word “smelt” also entered my apprehensive mind. The brandy claimed that it had been born in 1838, so one day more or less couldn’t affect its condition, as long as I kept an eye on it (for such bottles were liable to lose themselves on a leave boat). The wire-cutters were my private contribution to the Great Offensive. I had often cursed the savage bluntness of our Company’s wire-cutters, and it occurred to me, in the Army and Navy Stores, that if we were going over the top we might want to cut our own wire first, to say nothing of the German wire (although our artillery would have made holes in that, I hoped). So I bought these very civilized ones, which looked almost too good for the Front Line. The man in the Weapon Department at the Stores had been persuasive about a periscope (probably prismatic) but I came to the conclusion that a periscope was a back number in my case. I shouldn’t be in the trench long enough to need it. Apart from the wire-cutters and the pistol, all other “trench requisites” appeared redundant. I couldn’t see myself leading my platoon with Mortleman’s Patent Sound Absorbers plugged in my ears, and a combined Compass-Barometer also failed to attract me. The automatic pistol wasn’t “warranted to stop a man,” but it could be slipped into the pocket. It was only a plaything, but I was weary of my Colt revolver, with which I knew I couldn’t hit anything, although I had blazed it off a few times in the dark when I was pretending to be important in No Man’s Land. The only object I could be sure of hitting was myself, and I decided (in the Army and Navy Stores) that I might conceivably find it