Now if there is one thing a soldier loves more than another it's a "rumour"; and the more glaringly absurd, the more readily he will listen to it. So when the worthy old sergeant burst into the hospital with excited eyes, flushed cheeks and cap all awry after his latest trip from Boulogne, the boys crowded round to hear the news.
"They're here! By gosh! They're here at last!" he shouted, as he deposited his overflowing mail bag in the hall and looked triumphantly from one to another of his listeners.
"Who's here," demanded Barker, "the Germans?"
"Germans be blowed!" declared the sergeant with scornful emphasis. "They won't never be here!"
"Put a little pep in it, dad!" said Huxford. "Wot is it?"
The sergeant waited a full minute to give impress to his announcement, and then in a tense whisper ejaculated: "The rest of the Canadians are in France--the whole division's at the front!"
There was a dead silence for a moment, and then a wild cheer went up that shook the hall until the windows rattled.
"Ye ain't stuffin' us again?" Wilson queried anxiously, when the noise had died away. "Ye done it so often afore."
Plantsfield looked at him with withering contempt. That his word--the word of the chief "rumourist" of the unit--should be doubted was almost too much for human endurance.
"I'll stuff you, ye young cub, if ye dare to doubt a man old enough to be yer grandfather," he returned scathingly; and then turning to the others he continued: "I seen the Mechanical Transport near Boulogne and was talkin' to them."
"Oh, I'll bet you wos talkin', all right," Wilson came back vindictively, "if ye got within fifty yards uv 'em."
Plantsfield's garrulity was proverbial. He had been known to buttonhole generals and draw them to one side to whisper a choice bit of scandal in their unwilling ears--his age excusing him from reprimand.
He looked wrathfully at Wilson, but that wily youth kept his rosy cheeks carefully out of arm-shot. Turning back to his more respectful auditors, and for the nonce ignoring the disrespectful one, he pursued:
"The Supply Column on their way to the front saw a German aeroplane over them, forgot discipline in their excitement, jumped down off their waggons and blazed away at it with their rifles."