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this tail-wagging youngster with his wisp of a moustache, his falsetto tones and his plea for mercy.
    I saw rather little of them during the remainder of our stay at Darvel. While the non-commissioned officers kept the men busy, we platoon commanders spent most of our time on refresher courses in combined operations and assault landing. When we weren’t doing that, we were wrestling with administrative problems. I spent two entire days locating thirty-one folding bicycles in a distant ordnance depot—and two additional days trying to find the tires that should have come with them.
    From the emphasis on assault training, we knew we would be making an opposed landing—but where? A new issue of tropical bush shirts and cotton shorts convinced us for a time that we were destined for Burma. Then we were ordered to repaint our vehicles the colour of desert sand, which seemed to mean we were going to the Middle East. There seemed no end to the number and variety of latrine rumours concerning our ultimate destination, but we did not really care that much. It was enough to know we were finally going into battle.
    I wrote to a girl in Canada:
    I’m like a kid who’s been anticipating a birthday party for years and years and finally sees his mother lighting up the candles. We are about to quit the play-acting and begin living the role we’ve worked and prepared for so long. I think we’ll put up a helluva good show too, though it may take a bit longer than the propaganda merchants might like to think... Oddly, I don’t feel the least bit scared. Maybe that will come later, but at the moment I can’t wait for the show to open...
    It was a time when one made new and bosom friends almost overnight. One of my fellow platoon commanders in Able Company was Al Park, a tall, rangy, loose-limbed youth of my own age. We were billeted together in the same private house and before a week was out we were as close as brothers. For a time we shared the services of Doc Macdonald who, during my absence as an air liaison officer, had been working as a batman-driver in Headquarters Company.
    Doc was glad to be back with me. “Jeez, boss, I couldn’t stand that lot. They got no sense of humour there.”
    This was in reference to Doc’s provision of a turkey—a priceless luxury—to the Headquarters Company officers’ mess. Bad luck led to the discovery that it was really a prize peacock belonging to a wealthy local laird; but it was rank ingratitude on the part of Headquarters Company’s officers that resulted in Doc’s detention for ten days without pay.
    Being reunited with Doc was a great stroke of fortune but an even greater one was to follow. Lord Jesus Hyphen came a cropper one morning while riding a motorbike too fast on a curving road. Some of us had reason to suspect the bike’s brakes had been doctored; in any event, he was carted off to hospital badly enough injured to be out of circulation for some time. His replacement was about the last man an Ontario county regiment could have expected: Major Lord John Tweedsmuir, a bona fide Lord of the Realm whose father, onetime Governor General of Canada, was also the famed adventure novelist, John Buchan. Unlike Lord Hyphen, Lord John was an amiable and sympathetic soul whom we came to cherish and admire.
    DURING THE FIRST week of June the unit was granted four days’ leave. It was not called embarkation leave, and we were told it was nothing special—which fooled nobody. Men streamed out of Darvel to all points of the British Isles knowing full well that this was their last opportunity to drink in English pubs, make love to English girls and “live, laugh and be merry—for tomorrow we go battle-fighting.”
    Most of my friends headed south to London, but I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. Also it was still springtime and the countryside was calling me. I got out a map of Scotland and did something I had often done as a