"I don't like it," replied the Colonel gloomily. "Rotten discipline. The Army has no politics."
"What about the officers at the Curragh?" asked Ernie almost aggressively. "They begun it. Give the men a chance too."
"Two wrong things don't make a right," retorted the Colonel sharply.
Ernie got down at the station without a word. Was it an accident the Colonel, sensitive as a girl, asked himself? was it a deliberate affront? What was the world coming to? That man an old Hammer-man! One of Bobby Bermondsey yahoos wouldn't treat him so!
Indeed the avalanche was now sliding gradually down the mountain-side, gathering way as it went, to overwhelm the smiling villages sleeping peacefully in the valley.
Next day oppressed by imminent catastrophe, the Colonel, climbing Beau-nez in the afternoon to take up his habitual post of vigil by the flag-staff, found Joe Burt and Mr. Geddes already there.
Both men, he marked, greeted him almost sombrely.
"It looks to me very serious," he said. "Austria means to go for Serbia, that's clear; and if she does Russia isn't going to stand by and see Serbia swallowed up. What d'you think, Mr. Geddes?"
The other answered him on that note of suppressed indignation which characterised increasingly his utterance when he touched on this often discussed subject.
"I think Colonel, what I've thought all along," he answered: "that if we're in the eve of a European eruption the attitude of the officers of the British Army is perfectly inexplicable."