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[Page 91]
November 1
98.
Library: in the dugout here, and with Frank at the C.M.D.S.
"Certain Noh Plays of Japan", Cuala Press
"Poems", Alan Seeger
"War Poems", Vernide
"Our Eternity", Maeterlinck
"My Childhood", Maxim Gorki
"Keats", Selections, Rupert Brooke
"Imitation of Christ", Thomas a'Kempis
"The Sanity of Art", Shaw, Phamplet.
The "Selected Poems" of Rupert Brooke last night I sewed over its cover a part of a triangular bandage. Carrying it in the pocket is dirtying it.
99.
Torturously writing lying on my stretcher. The dugout's cupula iron and on either side carries 12 stretchers in four sets of 3… 24 stretchers. Turned in 9 a.m. and slept till dinner: slept again, and tea, and so to bed!
Last night, about this time,-'sadness set in': the rum bottle – jar rather – was placed ready for Nick to issue, on one of the rickety dugout forms… someone sat on the form… and the rum jar smashed its rum to the floor…now tonight Nick asks for loans of water bottles to draw the issue in – "they won't break even if they do fall!"
The Kookaburras have made one song well known to the troops, its melody swings, and its fully appropriate.
If its in John Bull
It is so!
It is so!!
It is so!!!
We know H.E.O. never was a fool,
Horatio's a pal of mine.
To see the boys went up the line.
And he damn near stopped a 5.9.
-It says so in John Bull.
It is so!!!
I always keep my John Bull's by!
That is how I prophesy!
The war was over last July!
It says so in John Bull.
Reddy – Mons! and Barrett last night, had a rather disastrous box-on at the C.M.D.S. – so Serge informs us. Reddy carries bad black eyes from it, and Barrett has been sent to the bearers!
No mail today: the Channel too rough. Tomorrow is due, Masefield's, "Herod the King" and two 1st editions of J.C. Squire's from Beaumonts. Theirs is a bonzer little book shop – one of the gems of Charing Cross Road: It was on Saturday afternoon after seeing at Drury Lane "Samson and Delilah" that I discovered it: and tragedy was in its being closed.
In the windows were all books of appeal…a Vale