arish; men who know that the
whole is greater than the part; men who are too wide awake to go on
doing just what the _Bandar-log_ tell them, and allow themselves to be
used as stalking-horses for low-down political ramps! When _we_, going
round in bath-chairs and on crutches, see that sight--well, I don't
think we shall regret our missing arms and legs quite so much,
Colonel. War is Hell, and all that; but there is one worse thing than
a long war, and that is a long peace!"

"I wonder!" said Colonel Kemp reflectively. He was thinking of his
wife and four children in distant Argyllshire.

But the rapt attitude and quickened breath of Temporary Captain Bobby
Little endorsed every word that Major Wagstaffe had spoken. As he
rolled into his "flea-bag" that night, Bobby requoted to himself, for
the hundredth time, a passage from Shakespeare which had recently
come to his notice. He was not a Shakespearian scholar, nor indeed a
student of literature at all; but these lines had been sent to him,
cut out of a daily almanac, by an equally unlettered and very adorable
confidante at home:--

"And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day!"

Bobby was the sort of person who would thoroughly have enjoyed the
Battle of Agincourt.

VIII

"THE NON-COMBATANT"

I

We will call the village St. Gregoire. That is not its real name;
because the one thing you must not do in war-time is to call a thing
by its real name. To take a hackneyed example, you do not call a spade
a spade: you refer to it, officially, as _Shovels, General Service,
One_. This helps to deceive, and ultimately to surprise, the enemy;
and as we all know by this time, surprise is the essence of successful
warfare. On the same principle, if your troops are forced back from
their front-line trenches, you call this "successfully straightening
out an awkward salient."

But this by the way. Let us get back to St. Gregoire. Hither,
mud-splashed, ragged, hollow-cheeked, came our battalion--they call
us the Seventh Hairy Jocks nowadays--after four months' continuous
employment in the firing-line. Ypres was a household word to them;
Plugstreet was familiar ground; Givenchy they knew intimately; Loos
was their wash-pot--or rather, a collection of wash-pots, for in
winter all the shell-craters are full to overflowing. In a