Rum Doings

Slogging toward the front during the third battle of Ypres in 1916, Gilford Dudley Seymour was, as he remembers it, the "youngest, tallest and scaredest" soldier in the Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles. But 17-year-old Private Seymour clung to duty, and duty was delivering his company's rum tot in two glazed-crockery jugs. The officer who was supposed to get the rum turned out to be dead, so Seymour buried the crocks where a hedge crossed a trench.

Now a prosperous Vancouver Island logging operator, Seymour was never able to forget the buried rum. Last summer he impulsively flew to Europe, found the hedge just where he remembered it. It took half an hour's digging to unbury the crocks intact. Elated, Seymour headed for London, searched out old army buddies who polished off one of the two-gallon crocks. The other he took back to Canada, where Her Majesty's Canadian Customs Department heartlessly ruled that he was entitled to bring in one quart of liquor and not a nostalgic swig more. Seymour got himself licensed as a liquor importer, paid $23.99 in fees. last week dispensed sparing nips from the crock to friends, who glowed over the "wonderful aftertaste."

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