“And then, Sir, we have the Card Index.  A complete record of every officer in the Army, permanent or temporary.”

“Are there still temporary officers in the Army?” asks the audience, not being able to think of anything better to ask, and clearly being called upon to ask something.

“Sergeant-Major, turn up ‘Officers, army, temporary, the, in,’ for this gentleman.”

And thus the shameful truth comes out.  One card only—­mine.

Exit audience wondering what manner of intrepid man this Henry might be.

Originally the W.O. had had a great idea; they caused my regiment softly and silently to vanish away, thinking that I would vanish with it.  But I had been too sharp for them.  Learning that they were bent on “disembodying” me, and not liking the sound of the word, I had very quietly removed myself from my regiment to the Staff.  Thus for a few happy months we see the W.O. rendered inert.

My final defeat was due to a chance remark of my own, made to one of the fifty-nine officers under whose direct command I served.  Upon my first arriving on his Staff he had said to me, “Oh, by the way, P.S.C., of course?” Quite affable, frank and to the point; “P.S.C., of course?”

Not knowing the language, I could not make an equally affable answer.  I asked him to repeat the question, but to change the code.

“You have Passed Staff College, of course?” he said a little less affably.

I then had the misfortune to answer:  “Why, of course, if you mean that tall building on the right as I came up here from the station?”

He then made up his mind that I was not only wanting in essential parts, but was also the sort of person who jested on religious subjects.  He never forgot the matter; indeed, when applied to (under “Secret and Confidential” cover) to suggest a means of getting rid of me, he very clearly remembered it.  At once every department in the War House got busy; the interest of the Secretary of State was enlisted, and the War Cabinet decided that for permanent purposes my post must necessarily be held by a P.S.C. man.  Done in by what was little better, when you come to think of it, than a mere postscript.

Please understand that there was no talk of discharging me; no talk of demobilising me; no talk even of disembodying me.  Without any reflection on my conduct and merely upon the grounds that, not being P.S.C., I could not be regarded as quite right in the head, they intimated their intention of vacating my appointment by the simple process of an advertisement in the fashionable columns of The London Gazette.

“What happens next?” I asked.

“You will return to regimental duty,” they said.

“But there isn’t any regiment,” I pointed out triumphantly, “therefore there won’t be any duty.”

They didn’t seem to mind that, and for some time I wondered why.  Then a thought occurred to me.