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chloride of lime and dead rats, or in idealizing the grousings of Ormand and Mansfield because the jam ration was usually inferior, seldom Hartley's, and never Crosse and Blackwell's. But we'd all done our best to help one another, and it was good to remem- ber Durley coming in with one of his wry-faced stories about a rifle-grenade exploding on the parados a few yards away from him—Durley demonstrating just how he'd dodged it, and creating an impression that it had been quite a funny German practical joke. Yes, we'd all of us managed to make jokes—mostly family jokes—for a company could be quite a happy family party until someone got killed. Cheerfulness under bad conditions was by no means the least heroic element of the war. Wonderful indeed had been that whimsical fortitude of the men who accepted an in- tense bombardment as all in the day's work and then grumbled because their cigarette ration was one packet short! But C Company Mess, as it was in the first half of 1916, could never be reassembled. Its ingredients were now imbued with ghostliness. Mansfield and Durley were disabled by wounds, and Ormand was dead. Barton was the only one of us who was func- tioning at the front now; he'd gone back last spring and had survived the summer and autumn without getting a scratch. Poor old devil, I thought he must be qualifying for a spell at Slateford by now, for he'd been out there eighteen months before he was wounded the first time. . . . No, there wasn't much sense in feeling exiled from a family party which had ceased to exist; and the Bois Frangais sector itself had become ancient history, as remote and obsolete as the first winter of the War. Everything would be different if I went back to France now—different even from what it was last April. Gas was becoming more and 659