He decided, after his second Burgundy, that it had
been simply a case of sticking it out. I say "Burgundy"
because we had substituted Burgundy, the sparkling kind,
for champagne at our dinners as one of our little war
economies.
Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line. In
fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke.
I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a
deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel
went through and there are two fingers that will hardly
move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its
clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So
he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him
straight across the table what he thought about the final
breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with
that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with
which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent,
and Tom was rattled at once. He answered something about
being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there
being so little chance over there to read the papers.
After that Professor Razzler and Mr. Quiller discussed
for us, most energetically, the strategy of the Lorraine
sector (Tom served there six months, but he never said
so) and high explosives and the possibilities of aerial
bombs.
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