“I thought so,” he said tersely.  “There you have a fine example of the desk general and major—­we had ’em in the army—­men who sit in a swivel chair all day, wear a braided uniform and issue orders to other people.  You’d think a man like that who had been trained at West Point and seen service in the Philippines would have sense enough to keep himself in condition.  Not at all.  As soon as they get a little way up in their profession they want to sit around hotel grills or society ballrooms and show off, tell how wonderful they are.  Here’s a man, an army officer, in such rotten shape that if I sent a good horse after him now it’s ten to one he couldn’t get on him.  I’ll have to send a truck or some such thing.”

He subsided.  About an hour later the major did appear, much the worse for wear.  A groom with a horse had been sent out after him, and, as the latter confided to some one afterward, he “had to help the major on.”  From that time on, on the short block and the long, as well as on those horseback tours which every second or third morning we were supposed to take, the major was his especial target.  He loved to pick on him, to tell him that he was “nearly all guts”—­a phrase which literally sickened me at that time—­to ask him how he expected to stay in the army if he couldn’t do this or that, what good was he to the army, how could any soldier respect a thing like him, and so on ad infinitum until, while at first I pitied the major, later on I admired his pluck.  Culhane foisted upon him his sorriest and boniest nag, the meanest animal he could find, yet he never complained; and although he forced on him all the foods he knew the major could not like, still there was no complaint; he insisted that he should be out and around of an afternoon when most of us lay about, allowed him no drinks whatever, although he was accustomed to them.  The major, as I learned afterwards, stayed not six but twelve weeks and passed the tests which permitted him to remain in the army.

But to return to Culhane himself.  The latter’s method always contained this element of nag and pester which, along with his brazen reliance on and pride in his brute strength at sixty, made all these others look so puny and ineffectual.  They might have brains and skill but here they were in his institution, more or less undone nervously and physically, and here he was, cold, contemptuous, not caring much whether they came, stayed or went, and laughing at them even as they raged.  Now and then it was rumored that he found some single individual in whom he would take an interest, but not often.  In the main I think he despised them one and all for the puny machines they were.  He even despised life and the pleasures and dissipations or swinish indolence which, in his judgment, characterized most men.  I recall once, for instance, his telling us how as a private in the United States Army when the division of which he was a unit was shut up in winter quarters, huddled about