However, we went to Hutchings, and he was much pleased, and said it was ripping of us all, and promised, the morning before he went, to try and get us a half-holiday as a memory of him. This was good, but still better was the great ease with which Hutchings decided what he wanted. He said:
"I'll tell you what I'll do. On my way through London to Dover I'll buy a pair of field-glasses, and I'll have inscribed somewhere on them--
'To LIEUTENANT T. HUTCHINGS,
FROM MERIVALE SCHOOL.'"
We agreed gladly to this, and so did everybody, and several chaps, who had suggested this very thing and been turned down, reminded us afterwards.
At any rate, Hutchings got them, and wrote to Barrington, from a direction he couldn't name, to say he'd got them, inscribed and all, and that they were splendid glasses, and that we might picture him often using them on the field, to mark the enemy's position or sweep the sky for aeroplanes; which was very agreeable to us to hear, and showed all our trouble was by no means in vain. And, in return, we wrote to Hutchings and told him we were very pleased to know about the glasses, and were glad to inform him that we had got the half-holiday, and that though it unfortunately poured without ceasing all the time, it was quite successful in every other way.
THE FIGHT
My name is Rice, and there was only one thing I hated about the War, and even that I had to stop hating, because of England. My first feeling was the War had come too soon, and that if it had only been four years later, I should have been there. But, saying this to Tracey, he pointed out that, from England's point of view, it was lucky the War had come when it did, because every year was making the Germans stronger, while we went gaily down the hill reducing our Navy and our Army too. So it was a jolly good thing the Great War hadn't waited till I went into the Army. In fact, in four years, by all accounts, there mightn't have been any army to go into.
"No doubt you'd have been a host in yourself, Rice," said Tracey in his comical way, meaning a joke, which I easily saw; "but, all the same, as we had to fight Germany, the sooner we did it the better."
So I gave up hating the sad fact of not being there, though it was extra rough on me, because many people seemed to think it was going to be the last war on earth; and if that was so, my occupation was gone, and I might just as well not have been born, except for the simple and rather tame pleasure of being alive. But what's the good of that, if you're not going to do anything worth mentioning from the cradle to the grave, as the saying is?
As far as mere fighting went, I did all I could at Merivale, and, after seven regular fights, got to be cock of the Lower School. And in ordinary times I should have been cock of the whole school; but, curiously enough, there was one chap of very unusual fighting ability at Merivale when I was there, and he was rightly regarded as cock of the school in the science of fighting.