The relevancy of this anon.
Another forsook the bunting-draped path of Signals to climb to fame through the smoke of many battle practices. He now adds after his rank the cryptic initial (G). The third married an heiress and her relations, and retired. He has several children and is reported to have lost interest in the Service.
The remaining one, when I saw him last, had also lost interest in the Service. He was lying in a curiously crumpled heap across the stakes of a jungle stockade, his empty revolver dangling by the lanyard round his neck. A handful of his men fought like demons to recover possession of the mutilated body.
"Sure," said a bearded Petty Officer, half apologetically, wiping his cutlass with a tussock of grass, "we couldn't lave him there—an' himself somewan's darlin', likely..."
Sailors are inveterate sentimentalists.
XI.
A COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY.
The Junior Watch-keeper entered the Wardroom and rang the bell with an air of gloomy mystery.
"The Russians are coming," he announced. "Cocktail, please, waiter."
The Young Doctor looked up from the year-old 'Bradshaw' with which he was wont to enliven moments of depression by arranging mythical week-ends at friends' houses in various parts of England. It was a dreary amusement, and, conducted off the coast of Russian Tartary, stamped him as the possessor of no small imaginative powers.