“As for the widows and children, I disregard ’em.”

Section 2

But presently Hugh began to be bored.

“Route marching again,” he wrote.  “For no earthly reason than that they can do nothing else with us.  We are getting no decent musketry training because there are no rifles.  We are wasting half our time.  If you multiply half a week by the number of men in the army you will see we waste centuries weekly....  If most of these men here had just been enrolled and left to go about their business while we trained officers and instructors and got equipment for them, and if they had then been put through their paces as rapidly as possible, it would have been infinitely better for the country....  In a sort of way we are keeping raw; in a sort of way we are getting stale....  I get irritated by this.  I feel we are not being properly done by.

“Half our men are educated men, reasonably educated, but we are always being treated as though we were too stupid for words....

“No good grousing, I suppose, but after Statesminster and a glimpse of old Cardinal’s way of doing things, one gets a kind of toothache in the mind at the sight of everything being done twice as slowly and half as well as it need be.”

He went off at a tangent to describe the men in his platoon.  “The best man in our lot is an ex-grocer’s assistant, but in order to save us from vain generalisations it happens that the worst man—­a moon-faced creature, almost incapable of lacing up his boots without help and objurgation—­is also an ex-grocer’s assistant.  Our most offensive member is a little cad with a snub nose, who has read Kipling and imagines he is the nearest thing that ever has been to Private Ortheris.  He goes about looking for the other two of the Soldiers Three; it is rather like an unpopular politician trying to form a ministry.  And he is conscientiously foul-mouthed.  He feels losing a chance of saying ‘bloody’ as acutely as a snob feels dropping an H. He goes back sometimes and says the sentence over again and puts the ‘bloody’ in.  I used to swear 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.