Free R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days

lanterns and a band of volunteers he headed back beyond Stonecross, where Archer the Third was found snivelling in a gully, nursing a twisted ankle and the fear of death from exposure. They carried him home sedan-chair fashion and when he sat down to his pea-soup David was in a worse state than Archer, and so stiff that he had to haul himself up to the staff bathroom and soak in soda. He had forgotten all about Bulgaria.
    It was easy to see how ageing men like Cordwainer and Acton had become so barnacled, tending, as the seasons passed, to identify the universe with Bamfylde and Bamfylde's concerns. Decisions like the date of speech-day, which pitchshould be used for the house semi-finals and crises like the influenza epidemic that filled the sanatorium in ten days, or the near-mutiny of the O.T.C. over threadbare puttees that kept unrolling during manoeuvres, had a way of enlarging themselves into events of tremendous importance. Who was the locker-pilferer in Outram's? Was he boy or domestic? Who was covering for Howarth, himself down with flu? What could be done to stem the overflow of the brook that flushed the latrines, inevitably known as the Bog?
    Surprisingly, it was Algy Herries who restored to him his sense of proportion once a week when he announced, often with tears in his eyes, the death of yet another Old Bamfeldian in action, and spoke a few words about the boy's years at the school. It was a sombre, almost masochistic duty he inflicted upon himself but David, who was beginning to get the full measure of the man, understood why he performed this weekly penance. He would see it as an obligation, to speak aloud, possibly for the last time, the name of a youngster, or perhaps someone who was not so young, whose shouts had once been heard on the pitches beyond the pointed windows of Big School, a person who had taken away with him some tiny part of the ethos of the school, planted in his mind and muscle during his time here. It was on these occasions that David would get a glimpse of that multitude of khaki-clad figures who had disappeared in the slime of Passchendaele, or fallen on the chalky wilderness of the Somme. For casualties, despite the Allied surging advances almost as far as the battlefields of August, 1914, were still trickling in, four in August, three in September, two more in October, one of them Bristow Major, who had been head prefect the term before David joined the staff and whose younger brother, Bummy Bristow, was still in the Upper Fifth.
    But then, like a thunderclap, it ended. Word came over the telephone – from Second Lieutenant Cooper, of all people, now training as a demolition expert in London – that he had it on the best authority (an uncle in Fleet Street) that a cease-fire was to be declared at eleven a.m. the following day, and although no newspapers confirming this stupendous news could be expected until late afternoon, Algy took a chance and announced a school holiday, with leave to go into Challacombe, if transport could be arranged. Local boys disappeared but a majority stayed on, pooling their pocket-money to empty the tuckshop, and Ellie Herries was set to work with other masters' wives to perform a prodigy of baking for a communal supper and sing-song in Big Hall instead of the usual Prep.
    The immediate effect upon David was to increase his popularity as the onemember of the staff who had fought at First Ypres, Loos and Neuve Chapelle, and who was regarded, somewhat to his embarrassment, as the ultimate authority on all things martial. He was cheered when he made his way up to the dais, luckily a little in advance of the other masters save Bouncer, who was there to say grace, and found himself blushing, for although he felt an immense sense of gratitude he could feel no personal achievement in survival when nearly a hundred Old Boys had died.
    He kept his gaze on the floor until Bouncer had subsided, but there was worse to come. When the school orchestra had assembled and