Yet the Colonel was right, and the scoffers wrong.  The Colonel was a poet who could listen and hear how the heart of the world was beating; the scoffers were prosaic cattle who scarcely knew that the world had a heart at all.  He turned us, if only for a moment, into young knights of high ideals, while they made us sorry, conceited young knaves.

You shall know what knaves we were.

So far from being enthusiastic over parades and field days, we found them most detestably dull and longed for the pleasures that followed the order to dismiss.  And after the Dismiss we were utterly happy.

It was happiness to walk the streets in our new uniforms, and to take the salutes of the Tommies, the important boy-scouts, and the military-minded gutter urchins.  I longed to go home on leave, so that in company with my mother I could walk through the world saluted at every twenty paces, and thus she should see me in all my glory.  And when one day I strolled with her past a Hussar sentry who brought his sword flashing in the sun to the salute, I felt I had seldom experienced anything so satisfying.

I was secretly elated, too, in possessing a soldier servant to wait on me hand and foot—­almost to bath me.  I spoke with a concealed relish of “my agents,” and loved to draw cheques on Cox and Co.  I looked forward to Sunday Church Parade, for there I could wear my sword.  It was my grandfather’s sword, and I’m afraid I thought less of the romance of bearing it in defence of the Britain that he loved and the France where he lay buried than of its flashy appearance and the fine finish it gave to my uniform.  I was a strange mixture, for, when the preacher, looking down the old Gothic arches, said:  “This historic church has often before filled with armed men,” I shivered with the poetry of it; and yet, no sooner had I come out into the modern sunlight and seen the congregation waiting for the soldiers to be marched off, than I must needs be occupied again with the peculiarly dashing figure I was cutting.

Once Doe and I went on a visit to Kensingtowe, partly out of loyalty to the old school, and partly to display ourselves in our new greatness.  We wore our field-service caps at the jaunty angle of all right-minded subalterns.  Though only unmounted officers, we were dressed in yellow riding-breeches with white leather strappings.  Fixed to our heels were the spurs that we had long possessed in secret.  They jingled with every step, and the only thing that marred the music of their tinkle was the anxiety lest some officer of the 2nd Tenth should see us thus arrayed.  Doe was in field boots, but his pleasure in being seen in this cavalry kit was quite spoiled by his fear of being ridiculed for “swank.”  Both of us would have liked to take our batmen with us and to say:  “Don’t trouble, my man will do that for you.”