Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AT CBOSS-WATS A Flat village sitting at cross-roads, with, a biggish church in the open space where the ways met: and all the space, and both roads, jammed with lines of troops and transport. Beyond the village level fields, some marshy with withy-beds that in England would have been likely to hold foxes, and some green with the beetroot-foliage; not many trees, and any there were in long lines, like lines of march. Far and low horizons with nothing to break them, and of the same dun hue as the cross sky. And mud. That was the picture. A dull village; with nothing to mark it off from the villages of yesterday; and, except for the soldiers, no young men in it: only women, children, and old or oldish men. All the troops at a standstill. A discussion between the officer commanding a unit and one of his Captains, each armed with a map and an opinion of his own: the C. 0. favouring the road straight ahead, theyounger officer that to the left. An Irish mess- cook demanding of a woman at a house-door if she had
any Dooly to sell : she, with French acumen, understanding, and producing milk. Fiddler, the bugler, smiling on the civil public in general, not without hope of apples. An Army Service Corps driver, with his neck tied up in flannel, addressing his two Belgian horses in the purest idiom of Munster. He changes their names daily: yesterday they were Fairy and Flirt, to-day they are Ginger and Blackstrap. But the Irish voice is always the same, and it expresses a dogged conviction that horses can’t get on without oats. A motor-cyclist dispatch-rider, who should be in the last throes of becoming a senior wrangler, and is actually a corporal, grim, mudded to the eyes, and yelping
Keep to your right ! dashes through. The group he splashes opine darkly that he might as w…