Welsh Journals

"A DAY OUT" THE Youngest-of-the-Three-of-Us. alias "the Baby "-he was twenty-four-came into billet and dumped his pack savagely into the corner. It had been a blustering morning for the Baby. He had started well by being late on Rouse Parade, and on O.C.'s Parade had provoked an eruption from the Sergeant-Major for a capital offence which that functionary termed bobbin abaht during inspec- tion. The Sergeant-Major-in civil life a steeple- jade-held strong views anent the mental capacity of graduate-rankers, and had expounded those views to the Baby with that pungent command of obiter dicta peculiar to Sergeants-Major. The Baby felt sore about it. A lion with the colic wouldn't have made more row he began, that Sergeant-Major Oh Shut up I replied. I had heard the Baby upon the Sergeant-Major before; besides, I was feeling stale and rancid, having just come off a twenty-four hours' guard. The tramp of ammunition boots in the passage, and the thud of another pack on the scullery floor announced the entry of George he, too, had struck a Pixie Day." If- he began ominously. Shut up, do I groaned in despair; I was in no mood for commination services. But there was much excuse for George. That day he should have gone on pass to London to meet a certain divinity, but. somebody in the division having been inconsiderate enough to have had measles, all leave had been suddenly withdrawn. George, therefore, stayed with us. Without doubt we were an unfortunate and a dismal trio-especially George. George," solemnly twittered the Baby, I, too, am a disappointed man, a derelict upon life's sea. Let us make common cause, let us each buy a tub and set it by the highway, and live therein on water and peas-ration peas-and rail upon the world's folly. Let us-" A truant waterproof-sheet, deftly aimed, suddenly blotted out the would-be Diogenes. He emerged at last, heated but lucid. Well, anyway, you mouldy old funguses, if you won't tub it, what about a bike-spin to work things off? Ex ore infante quoth a sarcastically rapturous George. But we went. An hour later, three hired bicycles creaked their way out of the divisional area and three privates proceeded to work off the mouldiness engendered of the monotony of six months' training with the prospect of going out still remote. It was one of those first pellucid days of spring, and we three Welshmen were out to see what was to us a foreign country," that flat rural England of the novelist, an England of poplar avenues, sleepy Norman churches and sign-posts with quanit alluring Saxon place-names. To Throssle Conquest ran the legend on the first sign-post that beckoned us. We halted and resolved ourselves into a committee of ways and means. Now, that looks alright." said George. That road seems to suggest the real article in country inns -ancient thatch, cool, white-scrubbed deal tables and the rest of it, a haven where the dusty wayfarer may refresh and listen while smock-frocked rustics discourse of turnip crops and the war and the price of sugar. A place with a name like that." I opined, should have a genuine old village church- Conquest sounds Norman for choice." "And," pursued George unscrupulously, "if we display a fitting enthusiasm for the architectural beauties of that church, a real English Henry- Newbolt rector might come out and show us round." "And" chirped the Baby hopefully-to such brazenness doth life in the ranks debase even a fellow of a University-" if we look very forlorn Tommy Atkinses that rector chap might ask us to stay to tea-and he might have daughters personally, I wouldn't mind an early game of tennis as a change from eternally forming fours," he concluded, smiling benignly at a shocked but confederate George. And it was as the result of such grave and weighty deliberations as the foregoing that Throssle was given preference over Dead Man's End whither the twin arm of our sign-post pointed. But, alas, for rural England as we had fondly pictured it Mile after mile of that road to Throssle we pedalled in silence, except for the cheep of our chains. We ran through no poplar avenues, we met no rustics. except just ordinary farm labourers" as George put if; there were only the wide, flat, bare Midland fields, and a far, round featureless horizon. We passed an inn-a real Saracen's Head "-but its roof was of slate, its walls of modern brick it was only old enough to be dingy and shabby while a great flaring brewery advertisement across its front took away all the lure of its name. At last we came to Throssle and groaned our disappointment in unison. Just a huddle of severely