A Fox Under My Cloak Read Free Page B

of the misery of cold and wet, was still in the fore-front of Phillip’s mind.

Chapter 2
REALITY AND APPEARANCES 
    O NE evening, when the company was in the half-finished support line, called Princes Street, a harder frost settled upon the battlefield . By midnight trees, bunkers, paths, sentries’ balaclavas and greatcoat shoulders, were thickly rimed. From some of the new men in Phillip’s bunker came suppressed whimpering sounds; only those older soldiers, who had scrounged sandbags and straw from Inniskilling Farm at one edge of the wood, and put their feet inside, lay still and sleeping. Lying with his unprotected boots outside the open end, Phillip endured the pain in his feet until the moment of final agony, when he got up and hobbled outside. He would make a fire, and boil his mess-tin for some Nestlé’s café-au-lait. There were many shell-fractured oak branches lying about; they were heavy with frozen sap, but nomatter. He passed the hours of painful sleeplessness in blowing and fanning the weak embers amidst the hiss of bubbling branch-ends . As soon as he sat still, or stood up to beat his arms, the weak red glow went dull. His eyes smarted with smoke; there was no flame, unless he fanned all the time. Move he must; his arms were heavy in the frozen greatcoat sleeves; while the skirts, mud-slabbed, were hard as boards. He set off upon a slow stumbling walk, his senseless feet like wooden props taking the shocks on the hard corrugated surface of the path. Hardly knowing where he was going (for the pain of the pierced nerves of his hands was multiplied with movement) suddenly he came across what seemed to be a little paradise, the glowing coke-brazier in the doorway of the signallers’ bunker at Battalion Headquarters; and peering in, was told that he looked like Jack Frost. After twenty minutes’ jumping about outside, the pains abated; and he crept in, the ice in his greatcoat creaking and crackling as he sat down.
    After struggling against a desire to sleep as he warmed his hands at the pink-blue brazier flames before the gap in the blanket-hung entrance of the signallers’ bunk—each company in the line had its morse buzzer—he saw what looked like a tobacconist’s shop, at least along one wall, on shelves fixed into the sandbags. Surely the signallers weren’t hoping to sell that tobacco, with so much already lying about in the wood?
    From talk at the Ration Dump on the road outside the wood, where the battalion wagons unloaded and returned (lucky devils) to their farmhouse two miles back, Phillip had learned that A.S.C. lorry drivers were selling hundreds of thousands of packets of cigarettes of every description to Belgian and French civvies of the towns along the supply route. A great quantity of tobacco was being sent at this time duty-free from England to the British Expeditionary Force. Many Comfort Funds for the Troops had been started by newspapers. As Christmas approached, “Smokes for Tommy” arrived in such bulk that the daily ration for each man was said to be anything between two and five thousand cigarettes a day, or a pound of pipe tobacco, or both. Carrying parties on the icy corduroy paths cursed the extra weights of wooden boxes. Scores of such boxes containing cigarettes, or air-tight tins of leaf tobacco, were lying about in the wood.
    â€œHow about a cup of cocoa, old boy?” said Journend, one of the signallers. Journend was in the Guarantee Department atHead Office. It seemed paradise to Phillip to be able to live, and sleep, in such a bunker. There was straw on the floor, a hanging hurricane lamp, and magazines which made it seem wonderfully home-like. If only he had volunteered for the section when at Bleak Hill! But in those days semaphore flag-wagging and heliograph signalling in the sun had seemed pretty dull.
    He sipped the thick hot liquid, sweet with condensed milk, offered to him in an enamel mug, while listening to