“I will obey, your Honour, but permit me to report that that fellow is utterly impossible.”
Khliabnikov took his place once more in the ranks. He looked lazily out of the corner of his eyes at the young officer, and stroked his nose with the back of his hand. Romashov turned his back on him and went off, meditating painfully over this fruitless pity, to inspect the 3rd platoon.
After the gymnastics the soldiers had ten minutes’ rest. The officers forgathered at the bars, almost in the middle of the exercise-ground. Their conversation turned on the great May parade, which was approaching.
“Well, it now remains for us to guess where the shoe pinches,” began Sliva, as he swung his arms, and opened wide his watery blue eyes, “for I’ll tell you one thing, every General has his special little hobby. I remember we once had a Lieutenant-General Lvovich for the commander of our corps. He came to us direct from the Engineers. The natural consequence was we never did anything except dig and root up earth. Drill, marching, and keeping time—all such were thrown on the dust-heap. From morning to night we built cottages and quarters—in summer, of earth; in winter, of snow. The whole regiment looked like a collection of clodhoppers, dirty beyond recognition. Captain Aleinikov, the commander of the 10th Company—God rest his soul!—became a Knight of St. Anne, because he had somehow constructed a little redoubt in two hours.”
“That was clever of him,” observed Lbov.
“Wait, I have more to remind you of. You remember, Pavel Pavlich, General Aragonski and his everlasting gunnery instructions?”
“And the story of Pontius Pilate,” laughed Viätkin.
“What was that?” asked Romashov.
Captain Sliva made a contemptuous gesture with his hand.
“At that time we did nothing but read Aragonski’s ‘Instructions in Shooting.’ One day it so happened that one of the men had to pass an examination in the Creed. When the soldier got to the clause ‘suffered under Pontius Pilatus,’ there was a full stop. But the fellow did not lose his head, but went boldly on with a lot of appropriate excerpts from Aragonski’s ‘Instructions in Shooting,’ and came out with flying colours. Ah, you may well believe, those were grand times for idiocy. Things went so far that the first finger was not allowed to retain its good old name, but was called the ‘trigger finger,’ etc., etc.”