“The rest? There isn’t any rest. You can see all there is of it.”
“But surely ...” Jeremy began, and paused.
The Canadian laughed with malicious and evil amusement. “They’re not great at fighting here,” he said. “If they’d taken only those that wanted to come there’d be you and me and the Speaker. And they wouldn’t take people from the fields—or not many at all events. And there’s nobody come from Gloucestershire or the West, though the Speaker sent to them twice. The farmers over there are waiting to see what happens. They don’t want to quarrel with the bosses that buy their wool. No, it’s not a big army—eight thousand at most. And yet,” he went on reflectively, “it’s more than I had when I tore the guts out of Boston. I tell you, we got into that city....”
“Yes,” Jeremy interrupted him nervously, not desiring in the least to know what happened in Boston, “but how many have the northerners got?”
“Oh, not many more, by all accounts,” the Canadian answered airily. “Ten or twelve thousand, I reckon. Oh, yes, we’re going to get whipped all right, but I’ve got a good horse, and I expect the Chairman will want to stand well with my dad. Yes—I’ve got a good horse, a lot better than yours.” As he spoke he glanced at Jeremy’s tubby nag, and his narrow mouth stretched again in the same smile of evil amusement.
Jeremy’s heart sank. But, as he was wondering whether his dismay was betrayed by his face, a gentle bustle rose around them.
“We’re marching off,” cried the Speaker, as he strode by with the vigor of a boy of twenty. “Back to your—to your charge, Jeremy Tuft.”
It was not until the whole army was well on the road that Jeremy found himself sufficiently unoccupied to examine it carefully. His old men resumed the march, with, if anything, a little too much enthusiasm. They were extravagantly keen to show the twenty-first century what their guns could do; but in their anxiety to take their place on the battlefield they behaved, as Jeremy bitterly though unintelligibly told them, like a crowd of children scrambling outside the door of a Sunday-school tea. Even Jabez, whom he had chosen to act as a sort of second-in-command, danced about from wagon to wagon and gun to gun like the infant he was just, for the second time, becoming. A company of the ordinary soldiers, who, in accordance with plan, had been attached to the battery so that they might help in man-handling the guns, watched the excited gyrations of the old men in solemn silence. The march northwards out of the little town was well begun before Jeremy could feel sure that his own command was smoothly and safely in hand. As soon as he was satisfied he left it and rode on ahead to see what he could make of the army.
He had had little enough time to make himself familiar with the new methods of warfare. He had, in his rare, idle moments, questioned everybody he met who seemed likely to be able to tell him; but he found much the same uncertainty as to the deadliness of modern weapons as he dimly remembered to have existed in the long past year of 1914. The troops with whom he was riding to battle were armed, and had, many of them, been drilled; but what would be the effect of their arms and how their drill would answer in warfare no one knew, for they had never been tried. He formed himself, this gray and early morning, a most unfavorable impression of them.
Their uniforms were shabby and shoddy, uncouth, loosely-cut garments, varying in shape and color. On their feet they wore rude rawhide shoes or sandals and round their legs long strips of rag were shapelessly wrapped. Their bearing was execrable. They made only the emptiest pretense at march discipline, they slouched and shuffled, left the ranks as they pleased, held themselves and their arms anyhow. The officers were for the most part young men of good family who had been appointed to commands only during the past four or five days. A few, those who had trained the army in times of peace, were soldiers of fortune, who had been drawn by the Speaker’s lavish offers to them from the wars in the Polish Marches and in the Balkans, from every place where a living could be earned by the slitting of throats. They were old, debauched, bloated and lazy, low cunning peeping out from their eyes like the stigma of a disease. They looked much better suited to any kind of private villainy than to the winning of battles; and the contingents under their command had an appearance of hang-dog shiftiness rather than the sheepish reluctance of the rest.