leave is the be-all and end-all of anyone who has been at the front for any great time. it is supposed to come every three months. it never does, but you know that if you stay long enough it will come, for army headquarters, corps h.q., divisional h.q. and finally brigade h.q. (i don't dare mention battalion h.q.!) "may use all of the leave some of the time, and some of the leave all of the time, but they cannot go on using all of the leave all of the time," to paraphrase mr. p. t. barnum in regard to fooling the people.
so all you must do is to possess your soul in patience, avoid getting directly in front of a shell or bullet, and some day in the dim and distant future leave will come for you to expose yourself once again to the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil in london; that is, if any of them remain when the bishop of london, the food controller, the anti-treating laws, and the provost marshal have done their work.
one day a fellow officer (in this connection i nearly said sufferer) informs you that his batman was told by the o.c.'s batman that he had heard that the brigadier general was taking leave the end of the month. after that you go on hearing by devious routes that the brigade majors, captains, and lieutenants are going soon, and suddenly you realize that shortly your own battalion headquarters will find leave filtering through on them. and perchance, toward the end of the list, you know you come somewhere.
it is then you look up your bank account, if you happen to have any, and you take no extra chances either with shells or superstitions, for soldiers are almost as superstitious as sailors.
you could barely find in the british armies ten men who would light three cigarettes with one match, and that despite the fact that the match ration is sometimes as absent as the rum ration. we none of us are superstitious, but we adhere to the same platform as did a very charming canterbury lady. her two sons, as fine chaps as england produces, were at the front, and as she and i, walking down st. george's place, came to a ladder leaning against the wall of a building, she carefully walked round the other side of it, saying:
"you know, doctor, i am not the faintest bit superstitious, but i am not taking any chances these days." and that is the position of the army in the field. they are not taking any chances.
your leave comes one day after many months beyond the three required of you. you start to a railhead where you put up for a night at an officers' club and mingle with the other happy beings who are leaving for the same purpose on the nine-mile-per-hour french train in the morning. as you sit about after a dinner that makes your ration meals for the past six months look literally like "thirty cents," you light a cigarette, cock up your heels, and look at the world through a beaming face, made ruddy by an extra portion of the grape juice of france, and wearing a smile that won't come off.
"you going on leave, too?" you ask genially of your neighbor, a young officer of that suicide club, the royal flying corps. he is about twenty-one, and you feel old enough to almost patronize him. but before you do it you glance carefully at his left breast to see if it is, or is not, covered with d.s.o., m.c., and perhaps, v.c., ribbons. to your relief you find it isn't. however, on second thought, you decide you will keep your patronizing for the army service corps and not for these smiling, gay, life-risking, dare-devil boys about you.
"y-yes in a w-w-way," the young chap answers with a charming boyish smile, "sick leave. my old b-bus hit the earth s-s-suddenly, and i'm g-going for a rest. i d-d-didn't always talk l-l-like this." and in an engaging way he stammers out an invitation for you to take a crême de menthe with him. of course, courtesy compels you, much against your desire, to accept. he has with him two others of the r.f.c., all young like himself, and for a couple of hours you listen to their modest tales of their really wonderful exploits, undreamed of except by the far-seeing few twenty-five years ago. one of the others has a scraped nose, blackened eye and swollen lip, which he says he received when his "waggon," in landing, struck a rough bit of ground which, "he tried to plow up and he must have hit the bally gravel underneath."
"w-were you t-t-tight?" asks the first with that boyish smile.
"certainly not," indignantly replied the other, and he laughed. "of course, i had had a couple in the morning, but i had a sleep afterwards, and anyway, the o.c. smelt my breath, and he wouldn't have allowed me up if he had smelt anything."
and you listen with fascination to their comparisons of their machines and their methods of diving; and "stalling," in which they drive up against the wind in such a way that they can keep stationary in relation to a certain bit of earth; and "corkscrewing," or nose-diving, towards the earth with a circular turning of the whole aeroplane, out of the midst of enemies, and righting the machine thousands of feet lower down out of danger.
you become quite an expert as you listen. they tell you that earlier in the war the german aviators were very chivalrous foes, returning courtesy for courtesy, never shooting a fallen enemy, and dropping notes as to the fate of some of our missing airmen. on one occasion the great german aviator, immelman, who remained chivalrous till his death, dropped a box of cigars on the aerodrome of a great british pilot, "with the compliments of the german air service." the following night the briton returned the compliment in the same manner. but now the germans in the air, as on the sea and on land, are much less sportsmanlike and take mean advantages of a fallen foe.
you listen to stories of the great exploits of baron richtofen's "circus," and still greater of the "circus" of our own captain ball—unhappily since killed—who at times went up in his pyjamas. he had a trick of shooting straight up through the roof of his plane at an enemy overhead and, fearing that the enemy might some day try the same trick on him, he had a machine gun so placed that he could also shoot through the floor directly downwards. oh, what entrancing, picturesque stories, beyond the wildest dreams of imagination two generations ago!
"i always take up with me a goodly supply of cigarettes in case i have to land where i can't get any. do you?" asks one.
"n-no, i d-d-don't. that's looking for t-t-trouble. i order b-b-breakfast of p-porridge and cream and b-b-bacon and eggs," smiles our young stammering friend. "and then it's all ready when i c-c-come in."
you listen for hours to these gallant boys who have all the fine natural courtesy and modesty of the well-bred english, and the gayety of a charles o'malley. unconsciously they make you feel that you really have seen such a prosaic side of the war in comparison with them. then, like all good britons, they for some time curse the government, and you aid and abet them. the night wears on, the liqueur bottle runs low, and at last you must say good-night to these rollicking boys who insist that you must not fail when you come back to visit their mess, "for you c-c-canadians, you know, are such d-damned fine chaps, and we l-love to meet you."
the little sin of flattery is so easily forgiven when it is accompanied by that frank, fascinating smile, and when you have all been tasting a drop of good french liqueur.
you wend your way up creaky old stairs to no. 13, or is it 31, and, luxury of luxuries, you find a tub of hot water—or it was hot at the hour for which you ordered it—awaiting you. divesting yourself of your clothes you double your body this way and that in a vain endeavor to dip more than half of yourself at once.
at last you feel clean, and you struggle into pyjamas, and crawl into bed between real, white, clean linen sheets for the first time in six months, and you sleep as no emperor can sleep on the most silken of divans, while you dream of the morrow when you really begin your leave.
leave! ah, we were speaking of leave! well, let us, you and i, take it together. let us enjoy to the full the flesh-pots of london. for our leave lasts only ten days, and the war must go on till we have shown the hun that he cannot autocratically put his prussian militaristic crown of thorns on the fair brow of civilization.
