Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

AN ARK IN THE MUD (December, 1917.) UNDER WAY 'There's our hut!' said the young hut-leader, pointing through iron palings at a couple of toy Noah's Arks built large. 'No—that's the nth Division's cinema. The Y.M.C.A. is the one beyond.' The enclosure behind the palings had been a parade-ground in piping times; and British squads, from the pink French barracks outside the gates, still drilled there between banks of sterilised rubbish and lagoons of unmedicated mud. The place was to become familiar to me under many aspects. I have known it more than presentable in a clean suit of snow, and really picturesque with a sharp moon cocked upon some towering trees, as yet strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torches, going and coming along the duck-boards in a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its true colours were the wet browns and drabs of that first glimpse in the December dusk, with the Ark hull down in the mud, and the cinema a sister ship across her bows