outside the scope of tales dealing with what may be called the "Under
Fire Front," and it was this front which I had in mind when I said that
gardening did not receive much encouragement at the front. But during
the first spring of the War I know of at least one enthusiast who did
his utmost, metaphorically speaking, to beat his sword into a
plowshare, and to turn aside at every opportunity from the duty of
killing Germans to the pleasures of growing potatoes. He was a gunner
in the detachment of the Blue Marines, which ran a couple of armored
motor-cars carrying anti-aircraft guns.

It is one of the advantages of this branch of the air-war that when a
suitable position is fixed on for defense of any other position, the
detachment may stay there for some considerable time. There are other
advantages which will unfold themselves to those initiated in the ways
of the trench zone, although those outside of it may miss them; but
everyone will see that prolonged stays in the one position give the
gardener his opportunity. In this particular unit of the Blue Marines
was a gunner who intensely loved the potting and planting, the turning
over of yielding earth, the bedding-out and transplanting, the watering
and weeding and tending of a garden, possibly because the greater part
of his life had been lived at sea in touch with nothing more yielding
than a steel plate or a hard plank.

The gunner was known throughout the unit by no other name than Mary,
fittingly taken from the nursery rhyme which inquires, "Mary, Mary,
quite contrary, how does your garden grow?" The similarity between Mary
of the Blue Marines and Mary of the nursery rhyme ends, however, with
the first line, since Blue Marine Mary made no attempt to rear "silver
bells and cockle shells" (whatever they may be) all in a row. His whole
energies were devoted to the raising of much more practical things,