It has always been a pleasure to me to follow for hours the winding
country roads looking out for fresh scenes and new adventures. The
life of the roadside dwellers, the folk who live in little stone
houses and show two flower-pots and a birdcage in their windows, has
a strange fascination for me. When I took up my abode here and got my
first free Sunday afternoon, I shook military discipline aside for a
moment and set out on one of my rambles.
There comes a moment on a journey when something sweet, something
irresistible and charming as wine raised to thirsty lips, wells up in
the traveller's being. I have never striven to analyse this feeling or
study the moment when it comes, and that feeling has been often mine.
Now I know the moment it floods the soul of the traveller. It is at
the end of the second mile, when the limbs warm to their work and the
lungs fill with the fresh country air. At such a moment, when a man
naturally forgets restraint to which he has only been accustomed for
a short while, I met the picket for the first time. He told me to
turn--and I went back. But it was not in my heart to like that picket,
and I shall never like him while he stands there, sentry of the
two-mile limit; an ogre denying me entrance into the wide world that
lies beyond.
There is one thing, however, before which the picket is impotent--a
pass. It is like a free pardon to a convict; it opens to him the whole
world--that is for the period it covers. The two most difficult things
in military life are to obtain permit of absence from billets, and the
struggle against the natural impulse to overstay the limit of leave.
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