a little out of the range of your parental ear, but
Ortheris has cured me. When he is about I am mincing in my speech. I
perceive now that cursing is a way of chewing one's own dirt. In a
platoon there is no elbow-room for indifference; you must either love or
hate. I have a feeling that my first taste of battle will not be with
Germans, but with Private Ortheris...."

And one letter was just a picture, a parody of the well-known picture of
the bivouac below and the soldier's dream of return to his beloved
above. But Master Hugh in the dream was embracing an enormous retort,
while a convenient galvanometer registered his emotion and little
tripods danced around him.

Section 3

Then came a letter which plunged abruptly into criticism.

"My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter. I must let go to somebody.
And somehow none of the other chaps are convenient. I don't know if I
ought to be put against a wall and shot for it, but I hereby declare
that all the officers of this battalion over and above the rank of
captain are a constellation of incapables--and several of the captains
are herewith included. Some of them are men of a pleasant disposition
and carefully aborted mental powers, and some are men of an unpleasant
disposition and no mental powers at all. And I believe--a little
enlightened by your recent letter to _The Times_--that they are a fair
sample of the entire 'army' class which has got to win this war. Usually
they are indolent, but when they are thoroughly roused they are fussy.
The time they should spend in enlarging their minds and increasing their
military efficiency they devote to keeping fit. They are, roughly
speaking, fit--for nothing. They cannot move us thirty miles without
getting half of us left about, without losing touch with food and
shelter, and starving us for thirty-six hours or so in the process, and
they cannot count beyond the fingers of one hand, not having learnt to
use the nose for arithmetical operations.... I conclude this war is
going to be a sort of Battle of Inkerman on a large scale. We chaps in
the ranks will have to do the job. Leading is 'off.'...

"All of this, my dear Parent, is just a blow off. I have been needlessly
starved, and fagged to death and exasperated. We have moved
five-and-twenty miles across country--in fifty-seven hours. And without
food for about eighteen hours. I have been with my Captain, who has been
billeting us here in Cheasingholt. Oh, he is a MUF