"Touching upon some of those unwritten exploits of the Army," I darkly hinted: "I'll bet I can find a brilliant historiographer not a hundred miles away from the 'Three Nuns' who could dictate a few of 'em that would fairly make the Daily Mail turn green with envy—eh, McNab?"
"I know the brilliant bloke you mean," my friend conceded modestly, "though calling me 'orrible names like that would brand you as a swanker or a gentleman wot had left his manners in the hall in any barrack room from here to Hindustan. When we were resting at Quality Street near Loos, for example"—he paused a moment, and with a playful dig from his banana-like thumb nearly knocked me on the floor—"why, name of a dog! There you have a case in point!"
"A case of a swanker?"
"A case of one of those spies. We caught the perisher. Begad, we did!"
McNab put the red-hot end of a cigarette into his mouth, stammered with wrath in a medley of international profanity at the unexpected warmth, and would not be comforted till his favourite barmaid had placed a slice of cooling lemon on his tongue.
"My first introduction to the entertaining sport of spy tracking," he mumbled, "was at Loos, where I was sent with several hundred other chaps to help push the Huns out of the Hohenzollern Redoubt. At the present moment, as you know (or ought to by this time), I am a military genius 'ighly thought of at the War Office, a strategist Kitchener has his eye on, and a model soldier quoted every day by my colonel as a shining light to the regiment. But of course you must remember that a few months ago I was practically a yob at the game, and now of the fame (and the extreme shyness that seems to come with it) of my later avatar.
"We took over some temporary billets at a shady little spot not far behind the British trenches which was then known as 'Quality Street,'" he continued, "and, as I not unreasonably supposed that the smartest and most intelligent bloke in the regiment would be sent to 'elp the colonel, I requested the Dog's Leg (Anglice—lance-corporal) to point out his abode to me.
"'Ask the Quarter Bloke over along in the end cottage, old sport,' he said with a grin, 'he'll be most 'appy, I've no doubt to personally conduct to the old pot-an-pan, and while you're there just ask him to let you have that jug of defaulters' extra milk for me.' It was a 'wheeze' among the boys to send a poor innocent bloke off for this milk. The point of the 'wheeze' is in the fact that as defaulters are chaps doing jankers (Anglice—punishment) they are hardly likely to get any extra milk dished out to them. I did not see the joke at first; but on application to that autocratic beggar—Quartermaster King was his tally—he fully explained things to me in that witheringly sarcastic manner peculiar to sergeant-majors and quarter-blokes.
"'Defaulter's milk?' echoed he. 'Why, you lop-eared leper, you've got corpuscular fool wrote as plain as a motor lorry number all over your ugly face. If I wasn't sure that you was not more of a born idiot than a ruddy knave, etc., etc., etc., I would have you slick in mush before your feet could touch the ground!'
"Much crest-fallen, and terribly mortified, I returned to the cottage which had been selected to shelter me noble self, only to be met there with a volley of derisive laughter, repeated demands for the jug of Defaulter's milk, and questions about the quarter bloke's health.