Vile Bodies

the English. Then they ran away, and the lorry I was in got stuck in the ditch, so I got in with some other foreigners who were on the same side as the English, and they were beasts, but I met an American doctor who had white hair, and he called me Emily because he said I reminded him of his daughter back home, so he took me to Paris and we had a lovely week till he took up with another girl in a night club, so he left me behind in Paris when he went back to the front, and I hadn’t no money and they made a fuss about my passport, so they called me numero mille soixante dix huit, and they sent me and a lot of other girls off to the East to be with the soldiers there. At least they would have done only the ship got blown up, so I was rescued and the French sent me up here in a train with some different girls who were very unrefined. Then I was in a tin hut with the girls, and then yesterday they had friends and I was alone, so I went for a walk, and when I came back the hut was gone and the girls were gone, and there didn’t seem anyone anywhere until you came in your car, and now I don’t rightly know where I am. My, isn’t war awful?”

The General opened another bottle of champagne.

“Well, you’re as right as rain now, little lady,” he said, “so let’s see you smile and look happy. You mustn’t sit there scowling, you know⁠—far too pretty a little mouth for that. Let me take off that heavy coat. Look, I’ll wrap it round your knees. There, now, isn’t that better?⁠ ⁠… Fine, strong little legs, eh?⁠ ⁠…”

Adam did not embarrass them. The wine and the deep cushions and the accumulated fatigue of two days’ fighting drew him away from them and, oblivious to all the happy emotion pulsing near him, he sank into sleep.

The windows of the stranded motor car shone over the wasted expanse of the battlefield. Then the General pulled down the blinds, shutting out that sad scene.

“Cosier now, eh?” he said.

And Chastity in the prettiest way possible fingered the decorations on his uniform and asked him all about them.

And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.

Endnotes

1. Perhaps it should be explained⁠—there were at this time three sorts of formal invitation card; there was the nice sensible copybook hand sort with a name and “At Home” and a date and time and address; then there was the sort that came from Chelsea, “Noel and Audrey are having a little whoopee on Saturday evening: do please come and bring a bottle too, if you can”; and finally there was the sort that Johnnie Hoop used to adapt from Blast and Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.” These had two columns of close print; in one was a list of all the things Johnnie hated, and in the other all the things he thought he liked. Most of the parties which Miss Mouse financed had invitations written by Johnnie Hoop. ↩

2. See Decline and Fall. ↩

3. This story, slightly expanded, found its way later into a volume of Highland Legends called Tales from the Mist, which has been approved to be read in elementary schools. This shows the difference between what is called a “living” as opposed to a “dead” folk tradition. ↩

Colophon

Vile Bodies
was published in 1930 by
Evelyn Waugh.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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David Reimer,
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Faded Page
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The cover page is adapted from
The Laugh,
a painting completed in 1911 by
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