Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/509

Small Patriot. "Oh, please do take my seat."

Ever since I gave up working and became a soldier I have longed to be in charge of an outpost. Then at last I felt I should get clear about the relations of its curious component parts. Can you, for instance, I have wondered, draw on your fatigue men for sentries over reconnoitring patrols? If you can't, you have twenty idle men and fifty vacant jobs; if you can, you have twenty men far too busy doing the fifty jobs. It didn't seem quite satisfactory either way. I felt it must be one of those arrangements that are right enough in practice but break down when you come to theory. I wanted the thing to play with a little by myself.

Not until three days ago, however, was I ever in charge of any such thing; then to my great joy, instead of going back to the enervating influence of our billets, I was sent to look after twenty men and one outpost.

Frankly I am disappointed. I don't believe it is an outpost. I don't believe it ever was an outpost. The twenty men are there all right. True, I'm always losing one or two in the straw, but they turn up again at rifle inspection. I don't really complain of the men; it's the apparatus that's all wrong. The post—I won't call it "out" any more; if I qualified it at all I should call it an inpost—consists of a stable, two cupboards, and a cellar. There used to be a house, too, facing towards Germany, but I can't find it anywhere now.

So much for the actual post. Now for us. We never reconnoitre, we never patrol, we never picket and we hardly ever fatigue. One sentry, and he by night only, watches over the entire proposition. If you were to enter suddenly you would fancy you had stumbled upon a homoeopathic hospital for the treatment of sleeping sickness—in short, non outpost sed bedpost.

The reasons for this scandalous state of affairs are twain. In the first place we have a whole firing line some hundreds of yards in front of us. So the chances against the Bosch arriving unbeknownstlike (as the corporal puts it) are less large than might appear if I were to swank to you that we were really an outpost. In the second place the disintegration of the house that used to face Germany, and a considerable accumulation of sizeable craters round about, suggest that it would be unwise for us to advertise our presence. We are, in fact, a sort of ambush. The men are first-class at ambushing, so far as we have gone at present.

To leave the post by day you must crawl out through a hole in the wall, and carry on through fourteen other holes in walls to a point some hundred yards in rear. You may then walk about and pretend to be a reconnoitring patrol or a picket as much as you like. We usually reconnoitre after leeks and lettuce, but there are carrots still surviving and strawberries to come, if, as seems to be the general opinion, we are here for three years or duration of War.

My cupboard is simply but tastefully furnished, with one chair, six boxes small-arm ammunition, one incomplete escritoire and four bricks (loot). When helped out with lilac, soldiers' buttons, hyacinths and pansies, it hardly knows itself, and the Major, dropping in unexpectedly the other day, mistook it for a room.

We have our moments of excitement even here. Now and then my appetite is broken by sudden messages, always arriving as I sit down to my lettuce. Then I parade the garrison and speak to them as follows:—

"Englishmen—(pause; electrical effect; two men drop their rifles)—Englishmen, your time of trial has come. Since we cannot go to the War the War is to come to us. The Adjutant has arranged for us to be heavily shelled (by the enemy) shortly after 3 A.M. to-morrow. Englishmen, I rely on you to behave as such; I am persuaded that you will. After dusk we will fare forth and put three more layers of sand-bags over the cellar. We will sleep there to-night and spend to-morrow there. Englishmen, Dis—miss!"

They are a mutinous crowd, I am afraid. They finished the job just as our guns started; then they all went to the front of the building and looked on. The enemy were mutinous too; they didn't shell us at all the whole morning. I told our Adjutant, and I expect he'll do something pretty severe about it.