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[Page 58]
vaguely .here the sun is, the rain beats down, rattling on the dug-out roof like a kettledrum roll, which increases when a gust of wind swishes the trees. It's enough to blow your hat into the gutter. Work is out of the question and to get out and walk worse than foolish, for the roads and tracks are mere bogs of treacherously slippery mud. Yet the guns are booming away and, not so far off, the great battle must still be in full swing. I've just had lunch which included some good old sweet corn, and if I had any news am free to write for the whole of the afternoon. Alas! I have nothing to write about. Partis, to whom I gave your message, is a dear old chap, a Yorkshireman from Hull, with plenty of shrewd brains and a big warm heart. He has been out in Australia for 9 years and is a fruitgrower from Shepparton, where I narrowly missed being born. He has 55 acres of fruit trees there. He is much attached to Australia and would never return to England. He is very considerate and kind in many little ways and as far as is in his power has made my, stay most agreeable. At lunch I remarked on a nice twill shirt he was wearing and he told me that it was one of two Ghoorka [Ghurka] shirts he had come upon on the peninsula. It made me think of the East generally, and in particular of duck drill suits and white-green- lined umbrellas and curries and the brilliant colors of flowers and natives' clothes and bazaars, and how fine it would be now if you and I were there instead of you in Blighty and me in France, with misery stricken, weeping skies all round and muck underfoot. I often think of a description I read, in an old Cornhill magazine, by an Englishman who went into a less known part of India, up towards the Himalayas, where the range was not perhaps so high as it is in some other places, but where the transition from the plains to the hills proper, owing to the absence of systems of foothills, is more abrupt, or apparently so, than usual. In this country he found, within a small compass, a number of quaint clans, each different from its neighbour and each with its own garb, customs, religion and rites. Racially they were different too and temperamentally. Some were the essence of peacefulness and others at times enjoyed a bit of a