But Jock shook his head. “Nay, it’s not the beastie.” He looked this way and that. As with Sergeant Walsh, his eyes and forehead were the only skin he showed. Seeing no one close enough to Walsh’s foxhole to overhear him, he dropped his voice to a near-whisper and said, “It hurts when I piss-hurts powerful bad.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Walsh exploded. “Who have you been fucking?”

Soldiers used the word all the time, in every possible form and most of the impossible ones. But hearing it used in its basic meaning made Jock blush-Walsh watched the skin above his eyes redden. Hesitantly, he answered, “There was this lady in one o’ the villages we went through a few days back. She gave my mates an’ me bread an’ boiled pork-an’ she must’ve given me summat else to remember her by, too.”

Coming down venereal was serious business. Your pay got stopped. Your family might even get a wire from the War Ministry-which was, of course, the last thing on God’s green earth you wanted. Even so, Walsh said, “You’d better take it to the medical officer.”

“Sergeant!” Jock yelped-pure anguish.

“I mean it,” Walsh said. “They’ve got new pills that can really cure you. You take ’em, you keep it in your trousers for a bit, and a few days later you’re fine. That’s better than letting the clap stew.”

“Nah. It ain’t.” The Yorkshireman shook his head again. “Ah don’t wahnt nobody t’ken of it.” His accent thickened as he got more upset.

Walsh set a hand on his shoulder. “Look, things are going to the devil around here. Nobody’s going to worry about paperwork at a time like this.”

“The sawbones will.” Jock spoke with dour certainty.

“Tell the miserable quack to fix you up, and tell him to talk to me before he goes and gets all regulation on you,” Walsh said. “I’ll take care of it-you see if I don’t.”

“All right.” Jock still sounded miserable, and well he might. He didn’t seem so proud now of jumping on that friendly Norwegian lady, though doubtless he had been at the time.