Cat's company [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE ABOUT MY CATS I HAVE RARELY BEEN WITHOUT A CAT. EVEN in France during the war I contrived to keep a cat most of the time. One of my trench pets was a jolly black and white kitten, christened Scissors by the mess cook, whose company he regularly patronized. Scissors, whose glossy black fur was ornamented by a neat white waistcoat, was a great favourite and knew his way about the whole of the sector. He used to follow us up the poppy-lined communication trenches and along the front line. Only a narrow strip of No-man's-land separated us there from the German front line and Scissors had a playful but dangerous habit of leaping gracefully on to the parapet and picking his way delicately along the broken ground, through the wire and over the massed sandbags, keeping pace with my orderly and myself as we made our cautious way below along the zigzag of the front line. It must have been perfectly obvious to 'the enemy' that Scissors was accompanying his officer on his morning round-indeed, one fine August morning we distinctly heard a laugh and a shout in guttural German from beyond the wire—but that part of the line was then known to both armies as 'peaceful' and no sniper or bomb-thrower tried his skill on the furry target. Scissors was wounded before we left the Arras sector by a stray fragment of shrapnel. It was, luckily, a flesh wound only, and when he got used to the little bandage I tied round his leg he became quite proud of it and displayed it to all and sundry; a habit which nearly got me into trouble with the Brigade Major, who, evidently disapproving of trench pets in general and bandaged kittens in particular, snorted at Scissors t AMfZJrR wni^RFf^T