Young Clatworthy was in the sulks, and sat very silent during all this badinage.
"What's the matter?" I asked, and he confided to me his conviction, while he passed the salt, that "life was a rummy game."
"Hipped?" I said, and his answer was, "Fed up to the back teeth!"
That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat, under cover of the Colonel's conversation, which was holding the interest of the mess.
"We're living unnaturally," he said. "It's all an abnormal show, and we pretend to be natural and normal, when everything that happens round us is fantastic and disorderly."
"What's your idea?" I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.
"Hard to explain," he said. "But take my case to-day. This morning I went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W's. (He meant prisoners of war). "A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car, the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over his steering-wheel, with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it's the first time I've seen blood!"
He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt—one of three left alive in his company.
"We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He had been married in '16, after the Somme, and hadn't seen his wife since. Said her letters made him 'uneasy.' Thought she was drinking, because
