The Colonel, in spite of the recurrent waves of despair, which inundated him, was at heart an unrepentant optimist.
"I don't see why not," he said. "Bobs says Germany can't strike till the Kiel Canal's open for battleships. That won't be till 1912 or so."
The old doctor moved into the card-room with a cough.
"Gives you time to get on with your job, too, Colonel," he said. "I wish you well. Good-night."
The Colonel was retired now; but his brain was as active as ever, his heart as big, if his body was no longer so sure an instrument as it once had been. And Lord Roberts, when he asked his old comrade in arms to undertake work which he did not hesitate to describe as vital to the Empire, knew that the man to whom he was appealing possessed in excelsis the quality which has always made the British Army the nursery of spirits who put the good of the Service before their own advancement. The little old hero, like all great soldiers, had his favourite regiments, the result of association and experience; and it was well known that the Hammer-men stood at the top of the list. Fifty years before the date of this story they had sweated with him on the Ridge before Delhi; under his eyes had stormed the Kashmir Gate; with him had watched Nicholson die. Twenty years later they had gone up the Kurrum with the young Major-General, and made with him the famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Another twenty years and they were making the pace for the old Field Marshal in the great trek from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein. He knew most of the officers, some of them intimately. And on hearing that Jocko Lewknor had settled down at Beachbourne wrote at once and asked him to become Secretary of the local branch of the National Service League, which existed to establish in England universal military training on the lines of Switzerland's Militia.
The Colonel made one of his rare trips to London and lunched at the Rag with the leader who had been his hero ever since as a lad he had gone up the Peiwar Khotal with the First Hammer-men at the order of Bahadur Bobs.
The Field Marshal opened the Colonel's eyes to the danger threatening the Empire.
"The one thing in our favour is this," he said, as they parted at the hall-door. "We've yet time."
The Colonel, inspired with new life, returned to Beachbourne and told his wife. She listened with vivid interest.
"You've got your work cut out, my Jocko," she said. "And I shan't be able to help you much."