A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
IN bad visibility you might have taken the eleven figures in white for a cricket team whose captain had set—for they were not widely dispersed—an offensive field ; but the batsmen and, appropriately enough, the umpires were missing. As a matter of fact the visibility was not very good. Last week's rain beat steadily down on the faces—so much more dutiful and attentive, now that they belong to Territorials, than they used to be—of the Battalion ; for we are a Battalion, though our twenty-two officers have just under three men apiece to command. Despite the rain it was easy to see that the cricketers—round-headed, drooping, disembodied—were not cricketers at all but dummies : wraith-like, flimsy : evoking by their stance and composition memories of Monty James's Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, in which the ghost made itself a body out of bed- clothes. Slightly upwind of the group—at deep mid-wicket, as you might say—stood a gallows, and from it hung a board the size of an
inn sign. The range was about 300 yards.
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