Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires,
listening with enchantment to the silence about them, free from the
noise of artillery. They were hugging themselves with the thought of a
month of this. . . Then because they had been in the salient so long
and had held this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to
recapture the position lost by new men.
After a day of field sports they were having a boxing--match in an old
barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General
Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing,
and the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for
the frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a
sledge-hammer. I knew some of their officers--Colonel Dyson of the
Royal Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways
with a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their
own officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of
his battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to
second lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd.
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