Leave is the be-all and end-all of anyone who has been at the front for any great time. It is supposed to come every three months. It never does, but you know that if you stay long enough it will come, for Army Headquarters, Corps H.Q., Divisional H.Q. and finally Brigade H.Q. (I don\'t dare mention Battalion H.Q.!) "may use all of the leave some of the time, and some of the leave all of the time, but they cannot go on using all of the leave all of the time," to paraphrase Mr. P. T. Barnum in regard to fooling the people.

So all you must do is to possess your soul in patience, avoid getting directly in front of a shell or bullet, and some day in the dim and distant future leave will come for you to expose yourself once again to the temptations of the World, the Flesh and the Devil in London; that is, if any of them remain when the Bishop of London, the Food Controller, the Anti-Treating Laws, and the Provost Marshal have done their work.

One day a fellow officer (in this connection I nearly said sufferer) informs you that his batman was told by the O.C.\'s batman that he had heard that the Brigadier General was taking leave the end of the month. After that you go on hearing by devious routes that the Brigade Majors, Captains, and Lieutenants are going soon, and suddenly you realize that shortly your own Battalion Headquarters will find leave filtering through on them. And perchance, toward the end of the list, you know you come somewhere.

It is then you look up your bank account, if you happen to have any, and you take no extra chances either with shells or superstitions, for soldiers are almost as superstitious as sailors.

You could barely find in the British Armies ten men who would light three cigarettes with one match, and that despite the fact that the match ration is sometimes as absent as the rum ration. We none of us are superstitious, but we adhere to the same platform as did a very charming Canterbury lady. Her two sons, as fine chaps as England produces, were at the front, and as she and I, walking down St. George\'s Place, came to a ladder leaning against the wall of a building, she carefully walked round the other side of it, saying:

"You know, Doctor, I am not the faintest bit superstitious, but I am not taking any chances these days." And that is the position of the Army in the field. They are not taking any chances.

Your leave comes one day after many months beyond the three required of you. You start to a railhead where you put up for a night at an Officers\' Club and mingle with the other happy beings who are leaving for the same purpose on the nine-mile-per-hour French train in the morning. As you sit about after a dinner that makes your ration meals for the past six months look literally like "thirty cents," you light a cigarette, cock up your heels, and look at the world through a beaming face, made ruddy by an extra portion of the grape juice of France, and wearing a smile that won\'t come off.

"You going on leave, too?" you ask genially of your neighbor, a young officer of that Suicide Club, the Royal Flying Corps. He is about twenty-one, and you feel old enough to almost patronize him. But before you do it you glance carefully at his left breast to see if it is, or is not, covered with D.S.O., M.C., and perhaps, V.C., ribbons. To your relief you find it isn\'t. However, on second thought, you decide you will keep your patronizing for the Army Service Corps and not for these smiling, gay, life-risking, dare-devil boys about you.

"Y-yes in a w-w-way," the young chap answers with a charming boyish smile, "sick leave. My old b-bus hit the earth s-s-suddenly, and I\'m g-going for a rest. I d-d-didn\'t always talk l-l-like this." And in an engaging way he stammers out an invitation for you to take a Crême de Menthe with him. Of course, courtesy compels you, much against your desire, to accept. He has with him two others of the R.F.C., all young like himself, and for a couple of hours you listen to their modest tales of their really wonderful exploits, undreamed of except by the far-seeing few twenty-five years ago. One of the others has a scraped nose, blackened eye and swollen lip, which he says he received when his "waggon," in landing, struck a rough bit of ground whic............