He went out of the house and got his bicycle and set out for the office. At the top of the Green he passed young Pinnock, the son of Pinnock's Stores. Some patch of colour about young Pinnock caught his eye. He looked again. The colour was a vivid red crown on a khaki brassard on the young man's arm. The badge of the recruits enrolled under the Derby enlistment scheme. He dismounted. "Hullo, Pinnock. How on earth did you get that armlet?"
"I've joined up."
"But I thought you'd been rejected about forty times. Haven't you got one foot in the grave or something?"
Young Pinnock grinned hugely. "Don't matter if you've got both feet in, or head and shoulders neither, over at Chovensbury to-day, Mr. Sabre. It's the last day of this yer Derby scheme, an' there's such a rush of chaps to get in before they make conscripts of 'em they're fair letting anybody through."
Sabre's heart—that very heart!—bounded with an immense hope. "D'you think it's the same at Tidborough?"
"They're saying it's the same everywhere. They say they're passing you through if you can breathe. I reckon that's so at Chovensbury anyway. Why, they didn't hardly look at me."
Sabre turned his front wheel to the Chovensbury road. "I'll go there."
VII
At Chovensbury the recruiting station was in the elementary schools. Sabre entered a large room filled with men in various stages of dressing, odorous of humanity, very noisy. It was a roughish collection: the men mostly of the labouring or artisan classes. At a table in the centre two soldiers with lance corporal's stripes were filling up blue forms with the answers to questions barked out at the file of men who shuffled before them. As each form was completed, it was pushed at the man interrogated with "Get undressed."
Sabre took his place in the chain. In one corner of the room a doctor in uniform was testing eyesight. Passed on from there each recruit joined a group wearing only greatcoat or shirt and standing about a stove near the door. At intervals the door opened and three nude men, coat or shirt in hand, entered, and a sergeant bawled, "Next three!"