Brigadiers sorrowfully plucked the bâtons from off their shoulder-straps
and replaced them in their knapsacks. The waste-paper baskets brimmed
with red flannelette and gilt edging. Field officers cast down their
golden crowns and crept slowly back to their original units as
substantive lieutenants.

And now all are gone, some home to England to write for _The Times_
(Appointments Required column) and some to watch the Rhine and see that
it gets up to no irregularities, such as running the wrong way or dry.
Here, on the fringe of the old battle-grounds, only the merest handful
of us remain, deserted by the field armies, apparently forgotten by the
management.

It has happened before. Bob, our Camp Commandant, swears that a
battalion of his regiment, while garrisoning some ocean isle, got
mislaid for years and years, and they would have been there to this day,
chatting to the crabs and watering the palm-trees with their tears, if
some junior subaltern had not sent his birthday-book to KITCHENER with
the request that the Field-Marshal would inscribe some verses therein.

Occasionally the boom of explosions coming from the devastated areas
tells us that our brave allies the Chinese are still on deck, salvaging
ammunition after their own unique fashion of rapping shells smartly over
the nose-caps with sledge-hammers to test whether they be really duds or
no.

Although a very courageous man, I do not linger in their whereabouts
unless I have to. I don't follow their line of thought. One of them
unearthed a MILLS bomb the other day. It gave off blue smoke and fizzed
prettily. When last seen he was holding it to the ear of a chum, who was