‘Yes, sir.’
At this juncture the Sergeant surprised a wink from Volnay, which that young gentleman supposed to have been unseen, and he fell a-thinking. The result of his cogitation was rapid and conclusive. The young man who knew the minutiae of his trade of soldier, and had an officer’s trick of salute, and was on winking terms with the wealthiest man in the regiment, was a person to be made up to, and to be made up to in the least transparent way.
‘We’re awfully short-handed, sir,’ said the Sergeant, touching his forage cap to Volnay. ‘We might utilise this man as a drill, sir, if you’ll permit me to suggest such a thing. I could get on twice as fast, sir, if I’d half the squad to deal with.’
‘Very well,’ said Volnay. ‘I’ll see the adjutant about that.’
And the raw recruit was drilling his barrack-room comrades before he or they had fitted on a uniform, and his ringing ‘Carry—so!’ or ‘Ground—oh!’ sounded through the square as imperiously as any in those first busy days.
‘You’re a (conventional) wonder, you are,’ said the drill instructor at the close of the second day. ‘You’ve got the powers that be behind you, and you’ll be one of us in a month or two. Promotion’s quick when the word comes for blood and rust and mud and oil.’
CHAPTER VIII
If Polson had not to be taught how to ride, how to handle a sabre or a gun, or how to balance himself in the goose-step—matters which he had taken the pains to master long ago—there were still certain things to learn, and the button stick, and the flat and chain burnish, and the pots of chrome yellow, and blacking, and pipeclay, were just as strange to him as they would have been to any other raw recruit; so that he was teaching his business at one end and learning it at the other for a matter of some four or five days.
There was a poor exile of Erin in the shape of an impecunious Irish nobleman, who enlisted on the same day with Polson and whose uniform was tried on in the same hour.