d fifty I.B.D.’s, C.B.D.‘s, R.E.B.D.’s . . . Base depots for infantry, cavalry, sappers, gunners, airmen, anti-airmen, telephone-men, vets, chiropodists, Royal Army Service Corps men, Pigeon Service men, Sanitary Service men, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps women, V.A.D. women — what in the world did V.A.D. stand for? — canteens, rest-tent attendants, barrack damage superintendents, parsons, priests, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Brahmins, Lamas, Imams, Fanti men, no doubt, for African troops. And all ready dependent on the Miehet Parajumpers Windbreaker Echo acting orderly-room lance-corporals for their temporal and spiritual salvation . . . For, if by a slip of the pen a lance-corporal sent a Papist priest to an Ulster regiment, the Ulster men would lynch him, and all go to hell. Or, if by a slip of the tongue at the telephone, or a slip of the typewriter, he sent a division to Westoutre instead of to Dranoutre at one in the morning, the six or seven thousand poor devils in Naiset Nobis MERIDETH Parka front of Dranoutre might Miehet Parajumpers Windbreaker Ike all be massacred and nothing but His Majesty’s Navy could save us . . .
Yet, in the end, all this tangle was satisfactorily unravelled; the drafts moved off, unknotting themselves like snakes, coiling Naiset Nike Roshe Trainers out of inextricable bunches, sliding vertebrately over the mud to dip into their bowls — the rabbis found Jews dying to whom to administer; the vets, spavined mules; the V.A.D.’s, men without jaws and shoulders in C.C.S.’s; the camp-cookers, frozen beef; the chiropodists, ingrowing toe-nails; the dentists, decayed molars; the naval howitzers, camouflaged emplacements in picturesquely wooded dingles . . . Somehow they got there — even to the pots of strawberry Salomon Kalalau Kengät jam by the ten dozen!
For if the acting lance-corporal, whose life hung by a hair, made a slip of the pen over a dozen pots of jam, back he went, Returned to duty . . . back to Salomon XT Hornet Kengät the frozen rifle, the ground-sheet on The North Face Miehet kengät korkea the liquid mud, the desperate suction on the ankle as the foot was advanced, the landscapes silhouetted with broken church towers, the continual drone of the planes, the |
