Well, the court-martial, though held by the sixth, was grossly unfair, and the thing they decided to do was simply cruel bullying in a superior form. To begin with, Macmullen, who is the champion speaker at our debates, was the leading witness against me; whereas I had nobody to speak for me, because though I was told three days before the trial to get somebody to speak for me, of course nobody would; and I had to stick up for myself, which was a thing I never could do. So I went down, and the fools pretended to prove that I had arranged hundreds of fights and been second at scores. And yet, somehow, I had never fought a single fight myself from the time I came there. Dozens of kids were called to witness at the court-martial that I had given them 'best' rather than fight them; and many were much younger than me, and one, called Foster, was only eleven, though certainly he was a great fighter, and many boys of fourteen had to give him best in the long run, though not till after they had fought him and been licked. Well, just because my religious opinions kept me from fighting anybody, and especially Foster, they called me an insect and a coward and a disgrace to the school and so on. Then Trelawny, as the head of the court-martial, gave a verdict and I was sentenced to have a fight, whether I liked it or not. Inquiries were made and finally the court-martial found a chap called Andrews, who was in my class and whose age was just one week less than mine. This Andrews and me they decided must fight; and when it was known, everybody wanted to be second for Andrews and nobody wanted to be second for me. Trelawny said we might have a week to train, and then the court-martial broke up. It was a brutal bit of work altogether, and I found rather an interesting thing, which was that Andrews felt quite differently to the affair to me. I talked to him privately as soon as I could, and pretended it was all rot and laughed at the whole thing. But he said it wasn't rot at all as far as he was concerned. He was a new boy and rather keen to make friends and be well thought of; so he considered this a jolly good opportunity and began to train as well as he knew how. I saw at a glance that he could lick me, for I'd never learned fighting and hated hurting anything, I'm sure, always; and I argued a good deal with Andrews about it. He said that his father had told him that a chance to make friends and distinguish himself would be sure to come. And Andrews said no doubt his father was right, and that the chance had come and that he was going to distinguish himself as much as he could on me.
Well, of course I saw what had to be done. Just at that time I was rather unfairly hated by Dr. Dunstan, because of an affair in the playground. There was a fir-tree in it at one corner, and I had found that turpentine came out if you cut notches in it. Well, into this turpentine I stuck live ants and then burnt them up with a burning-glass. It was nothing; but old Briggs, the writing master and natural history master, discovered me doing it and must needs make a ridiculous fuss. He told the Doctor and the Doctor made a ridiculous fuss too and turned against me and hated me. So Dunstan was out of the question, and there was only one other master I could tell, and that was Monsieur Michel, the French master. But he was weak and useless in an emergency like this; so finally I decided that the proper person to approach would be Andrews himself.
That much was pretty easy to decide, but then came the question what to say to him, and I was helped in this matter by a very lucky thing. It came out in class that Andrews was an absolute flyer at geography, and though not as good as me—me being head of the class in that subject—still he jolly soon got second to me and stopped there. I am a tremendous dab at geography myself; and if I knew as much about other things I should be in the sixth; and if a good many things I know—especially about religious saints—were regular subjects in school, instead of being barred altogether, I should also be in the sixth.
And finding out the greatness of Andrews at geography gave me the idea I wanted, which happened only just in time; because the day I spoke to him was a Wednesday and the next Saturday was the day we had to fight.
I said—
"Aren't you looking forward to Saturday?"
And he said—
"Yes, I am."
And I said—
"So am I, because I'm in training too; and I find that I fight tremendously well, and I'm only sorry I hadn't to fight a lot sooner."