“‘That’s a clean shot, little man,’ said Mulvaney.

“Learoyd thoughtfully watched the smoke clear away.  ’Happen there was a lass tewed up wi’ him, too,’ said he.

“Ortheris did not reply.  He was staring across the valley, with the smile of the artist who looks on the completed work.”

This passage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his inhuman delight in the hunting of man.  If we look at it closely we shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr Hinchcliffe the engineer or in Dick Heldar the painter, and (2) the extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born sentimentalist in Learoyd’s little touch of feeling at the close.

The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and calm directions for getting a “good point” in bayonet exercise.  The bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the practitioner and a maximum of damage to the subject.  Disabling the enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be technical.  Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards, painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as the “most poetical paragraph in the English language,” or building a bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special nature.  Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very near to the professional view of soldiering.  All Mr Kipling’s soldiers take their soldiering as men of business.  This was what so terribly astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and “wanted a smoke too”; and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr Kipling’s literary critics.

The greatest study in literature of the professional soldier—­though he is infinitely more than that—­is Shakespeare’s Falstaff.  It will be remembered that Falstaff, after having led his men where they were finely peppered, also suffered from thirst; and, being an old campaigner, he was not unprovided.  The fate of Falstaff upon the British stage for many centuries—­where he has actually been played, not as a professional soldier, but as an incompetent poltroon!—­seems to indicate that no figure is more liable to be misunderstood than the man whose business or duty it is to fight between meals.  Even Mr Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be regarded as just a skilled practitioner whose work asks for courage and resource, fails to take