He became, to sum up his attitude, less and less like Victor. But it is not to be presumed that he was sinking into mental nothingness. He was not perhaps quite so refined in his language as he might have been, he used slang, and sometimes was inclined to hang his hat on the floor and talk back. He was rather untidy in his dress. But certain compensating qualities of the highest value were appearing in Tim. He had gathered to himself a plentiful supply of gumption—genius is all right, but if it comes to a slow-down gumption is better. His hatred of "swank" reached the point of unreasoning prejudice. He made many mistakes; but depend upon this: the man who has never made a mistake has never made anything else worth having.
And Tim never became a great soldier, or a great sailor, or anything great. But he had good spirits, and he concealed about his person a heart of gold; and after he left Thetford Grammar School, boys found that somehow the games in the old playground seemed flat and spiritless. They said that things weren't as they used to be in Tim's time.
I have told the reader that Tim Gamelyn's father was a retired non-commissioned officer who lived near Dublin on a small private income and a pension. It will be seen that Tim's people did not roll in wealth any to speak of. They owned a small farm with five cows, twenty pigs and a flock of hens. There was beer always in the cellar, bacon hanging up in the kitchen and a bucket of soft soap in the out-house. In the top lean-to room where Tim slept, in the winter time the rain and sleet drifted cheerily in through the cracks and covered the army blankets which covered him. But he didn't lie awake thinking about it—boys like Tim who help on farms start playing shut-eye as soon as they hit the pillow.
Old Sergeant Gamelyn came of an ancestry which, somebody or other of distinction once said—and very truly—is the backbone of the British Army. To put it briefly, if not gracefully, "what old Gamelyn didn't know about soldiering weren't worth knowin'!" He had the ten thousand and ten commandments of the King's Regulations always at his finger tips, and he and his people had served in the same battalion, under the same officers or descendants for generations. There was Michael Gamelyn who fell at Malplaquet; there was another Gamelyn who had served at Minden; four Gamelyns served through the Peninsular. But only one came through to Waterloo. Balaclava, the Indian Mutiny and Spion Kop each claimed a Gamelyn, and when the British troops returned from Lhasa in 1904 they left one Sergeant Royden Gamelyn—resting in peace ten paces to the rear of the Pargo Keeling Gate. Of course Tim Gamelyn grew up in the shadow of these things. There was an old book in his father's oak kit box which Tim loved. In it he read about forgotten drill and manual exercises, the uncomfortable and graceless manœuvres of the rigid but redoubtable men who fought at Waterloo. Also there were pictures in colour of warriors in three-cornered hats, high stocks and powdered wigs. These men Tim worshipped. He had by heart the quaint words of command in which Wellington's men were told to charge a musket with powder and ball. And I doubt not that he could have taken a brigade and marched them to the attack with the best of the old-time sergeants.
Then in August 1914 came the great war, and when Tim suggested going into Dublin to see Colonel Arbuthnot about joining up to that battalion through which all the best of the Gamelyn men had passed, his mother tried to laugh. But Tim saw the tears running down her cheeks, as she threw her apron over her head and went out to bring the clothes in off the line. His father then flung out his hand to him and said:
"Good boy, I thought 'twas in you. Good luck."
But when Tim joined his regiment soldiering had taken many new turns. The modern rifle would not allow men to march into battle with colours flying and bands playing: the old brave way was impossible in the face of machine guns. The pomp and pageantry of battle had departed and there was nothing left but for the attacking party to crawl in a most inelegant fashion upon the ground.
"Down!" cried the sergeant-instructor to poor Tim, who started his lessons in field training with some vague idea about marching on the foe with "head and eyes erect" and with "pace unfaltering and slow." "When you get out to Flanders you will have to get right down on your belly if you want to live a little longer than ten minutes. Extend to five-six-ten paces and get as close to old mother earth as possible and hide your bloomin' selves!"
"Hide yourselves!" thought Tim. "Not thus is it written in my father's book of drill! It plainly said therein that the duty of a soldier was to learn how to die, not to hide from death."
Crushed and dejected he returned that morning to breakfast to wolf a chunk of bread and butter, washed down by dishwater, misnamed tea.