“No,” I said, although B——­ had a way of telling the same stories twice over occasionally.  The one story he never told, not even once, was how he got the D.S.O. at Spion Kop.  I had heard it often enough from other men in the service, and could never hear it too often.  And let me tell you that to know B——­ and have the privilege of his friendship, is to be admitted to the largest freemasonry of officers in the British Army.

“Well, it was like this,” continued B——.  “The A.D.M.S. was a thorn in the side of every O.C. at the Base, walking up and down like the very devil, seeking whose reputation he might devour, and ordering every O.C. to turn his hospital upside down.  He took a positive delight in breaking men.  You know the type, the kind of man who breaks his wife’s heart not because he’s bad, but because he’s querulous.  The nagging type.  Nothing could please him.  So one day he came to Simpson’s show, where I was second in command.  “How many patients have you got accommodation for here?” he asked me, Simpson being laid up with a recurrence of his malaria.  “Four hundred and fifty, sir,” I said.  “Very good, have accommodation for a thousand to-morrow night,” said Macassey with a cock of his eye that I knew only too well.  We were not full up, as it was, although pretty hard-worked, being short-handed and with a devil of a lot of enteric, and there wasn’t the remotest likelihood of any more patients arriving, as they were switching them off to Durban.  However, it was no use grousing, that only made old Macassey more wicked than ever, but I thought I’d have it in black and white; so I saluted and said, ’Bad memory, sir, my old wound in India, d’you mind writing the order down?’”

“My dear B——­,” I interrupted, “you know you’ve the memory of a Recording Angel.”

“So I do, my son, and so I did.  Also I knew that Macassey’s memory, like that of most fussy men, was as bad as mine was good.  I thought I’d catch him out sooner or later.  He and I went round the camp, and, after about half-an-hour of the most putrid crabbing, he suddenly caught sight of some double-roofed Indian tents that Simpson had got together with great difficulty for the worst cases.  You see we’d mostly tin huts, and in the African heat they’re beastly.  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Macassey wickedly.  ’I see you have some good double-roofed tents here; let me have eight of them sent to me to-morrow night.’  That left us with four, and how we were to shift the patients was a problem.  ‘Very good, sir,’ I said, ‘but I may forget the number.  D’you mind?’ And I held out my Field Note-book, having turned over the page.” (There are not many people who can say ‘No’ to B——.) “He didn’t mind, So he wrote it down.  Naturally I took care of those pages.  Next day old Macassey must have remembered that he had issued two contradictory orders in the same day.  Ordered me to expand and contract at the same time, like the third ventricle.  And he knew that I had first-class documentary evidence, and that I guarded his autographs as though I were going to put ’em up for sale at Sotheby’s.  He never troubled us any more.”