the surfeit of luxuries and lack of company on the leave boat, our gallant
warriors continue to volunteer in thousands for that desperate enterprise
known as "Proceeding on leave to the U.K." There is however a certain
artfulness in the business, if only artfulness for artfulness' sake.

In the old days the ingenuity of man was concentrated upon extending by any
means short of the criminal the duration of the leave. When Robert first
went on leave he was young and innocent. He had four days given him; he
left his unit on the first of them and was back with it on the last of
them. The second time he improved on this and left France very early on the
morning of his first day and arrived in France again very late on the last
night of it. Then his friend John regarded _his_ leave as beginning and
ending in England, which, if the leave boat happens to be in mid-Channel at
midnight, is not a distinction without a difference. Robert's next leave
was for seven days, and he spent nine of them in the U.K. His explanation
was logically unassailable, but logic is wasted on military authorities;
after that, leave got fixed at ten days net, ten days of the inelastic
sort.

Give a man an inch and he'll take an ell; give him an ell and he is no man
if he doesn't improve even on that. Moreover, how is one to fill in the
dismal vacuum subsequent on the return from one leave otherwise than by the
discussion of subtle schemes for the betterment of the next leave? The
duration of it having assumed a cast-iron rigidity, it only remained to
improve the manner of travelling to and fro. John ferreted about and became
aware of the existence of a civilian train to the port and of a Staff boat
to the other port. He worked up a friendship with a Fonctionnaire de Chemin
de Fer, and took the civilian train; he made a very natural, if very
regrettable, mistake on the quay, and crossed in the Staff boat. He was
able to repeat the friendship and the mistake on the return journey, and