THE ANGELS OF MONS
there'd be a bit of fancy work, a shriek owl letting off within an inch of your ear, and when you'd done wondering your throat'ld be cut and you'ld be dead. They have a nasty kind of knives, cookeries they call them. And quite right."
The wounded man was giving the chaplain his impressions of the war. He had lost an arm in the Gallipoli fighting, and had been invalided home. The two were sitting in deck-chairs in the hospital garden on a sunny afternoon. And between his bursts of information the soldier sucked gratefully at his pipe, drawing in rich fumes of shag tobacco. And then he looked out over shrubs and flowers on a deep, blue sea.
The chaplain had been trying a little Kipling on the soldier. He had experimented with "The Drums of the Fore
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