Once, and only once, did he give us a peep behind the scenes.  Private Burke, of D Company, a cheery soul, who possesses the entirely Hibernian faculty of being able to combine a most fanatical and seditious brand of Nationalism with a genuine and ardent enthusiasm for the British Empire, one day made a contemptuous and ribald reference to the Ulster Volunteers and their leader.  M’Ostrich, who was sitting on his bedding at the other side of the hut, promptly rose to his feet, crossed the floor in three strides, and silently felled the humorist to the earth.  Plainly, if M’Ostrich comes safe through the war, he is prepared for another and grimmer campaign.

Lastly, that jack-of-all trades and master of none, Private Dunshie.  As already recorded, Dunshie’s original calling had been that of a street news-vendor.  Like all literary men, he was a Bohemian at heart.  Routine wearied him; discipline galled him; the sight of work made him feel faint.  After a month or two in the ranks he seized the first opportunity of escaping from the toils of his company, by volunteering for service as a Scout.  A single experience of night operations in a dark wood, previously described, decided him to seek some milder employment.  Observing that the regimental cooks appeared to be absolved, by virtue of their office, not only from all regimental parades, but from all obligations on the subject of correct attire and personal cleanliness, he volunteered for service in the kitchen.  Here for a space—­clad in shirt, trousers, and canvas shoes, unutterably greasy and waxing fat—­he prospered exceedingly.  But one sad day he was detected by the cook-sergeant, having just finished cleaning a flue, in the act of washing his hands in ten gallons of B Company’s soup.  Once more our versatile hero found himself turned adrift with brutal and agonising suddenness, and bidden to exercise his talents elsewhere.

After a fortnight’s uneventful dreariness with his platoon, Dunshie joined the machine-gunners, because he had heard rumours that these were conveyed to and from their labours in limbered waggons.  But he had been misinformed.  It was the guns that were carried; the gunners invariably walked, sometimes carrying the guns and the appurtenances thereof.  His very first day Dunshie was compelled to double across half a mile of boggy heathland carrying two large stones, meant to represent ammunition-boxes, from an imaginary waggon to a dummy gun.  It is true that as soon as he was out of sight of the corporal he deposited the stones upon the ground, and ultimately proffered two others, picked up on nearing his destination, to the sergeant in charge of the proceedings; but even thus the work struck him as unreasonably exacting, and he resigned, by the simple process of cutting his next parade and being ignominiously returned to his company.