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[Page 15]
aren't interested, but me it interested intensely - and always will. Apart from the beauty and mystery of the phenomenon it makes my mind exert itself very energetically in numberless speculations - mostly insoluble and not even to be formulated at the time. This evening the situation is quite different. At this actual moment there isn't a single sound - not one except some wayfarer's footsteps on the crunchy street and some small birds in a huge beech tree I can see from the garret window. It has rained heavily all day and now at 7 o'clock the sky is clear, except for some mountainous, wool bale clouds. This is the first time for even a minute that strafe has ceased since I arrived, and for 20 minutes all has been quiet. Not even in the distance can a sound be heard. But to get back (I can hear the guns far off, waking up). I went to bed disgusted at 11 o'clock, though I could see that the concert had lasted longer than my friends had foreseen and so couldn't leave. So, first thing this morning I went to see Capt. K. the camp commandant, (our air-squadrons are off now for Jerry's lines and beyond-like flocks of wild swans, flying wedge shaped) and he told me to get his corporal to order me a half-limber from the transport lines, so that I could go myself to the camp and get the anxiety-causing, traps. The horse lines are under a lovely double-lined avenue of beeches. Everything under them is in dark green shade and so, horse: limbers and men ever move about richly silhouetted against a background of sunlit landscape. In the sparkling morning light this background was emerald and gold; sunlight on grass, mustard and other vegetation and "Norman" (that's all) and I and the two horses set out for .........£1,000 if you guess it. While he had been oiling up his harness I had been studying up a map, though I had a fair grip of the route. We took a road leading to a wood, which like every wood about contained various little camps of odds and ends - they are full of surprises. We cut through near one end of it and then struck a metalled road carrying plenty of traffic and after a few hundred yards of travel I heartily cursed the regulation that decrees that half limbers shall have no springs. Rough! "rougher than goats' knees" as they say out here. Then the rain came down in Noachian style. In five minutes we were