They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of Europe. For myself, I should be willing to run the risk of an occasional row. Cannot someone tell them they are out of date, with their bits of feathers and their odds and ends of ironmongery—grown men that cannot be sent out for a walk unless accompanied by a couple of nursemen, blowing a tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order and prevent their running about: one might think they were chickens. A herd of soldiers with their pots and pans and parcels, and all their deadly things tied on to them, prancing about in time to a tune, makes me think always of the White Knight that Alice met in Wonderland. I take it that for practical purposes—to fight for your country, or to fight for somebody else’s country, which is, generally speaking, more popular—the thing essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be able to shoot straight with a gun. How standing in a line and turning out your toes is going to assist you, under modern conditions of warfare, is one of the many things my intellect is incapable of grasping.
In mediæval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been advantage in combined and precise movement. When armies were mere iron machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the earth, then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of the game. Now, when we shoot from behind cover with smokeless powder, brain not brute force—individual sense not combined solidity is surely the result to be aimed at. Cannot somebody, as I have suggested, explain to the military man that the proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities?
I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks, and saw much of the drill sergeant’s method. Generally speaking, he is a stout man with the walk of an egotistical pigeon. His voice is one of the most extraordinary things in nature: if you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog, you are clever. They tell me that the privates, after a little practice, can—which gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise one might form. But myself I doubt even this statement. I was the owner of a fine retriever dog about the time of which I am speaking, and sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr. Sergeant exercising his squad. One morning he had been shouting out the usual “Whough, whough, whough!” for about ten minutes, and all had hitherto gone well. Suddenly, and evidently to his intense astonishment, the squad turned their backs upon him and commenced to walk towards the Serpentine.
“Halt!” yelled the sergeant, the instant his amazed indignation permitted him to speak, which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment from a watery grave.
The squad halted.
“Who the thunder, and the blazes, and other things told you to do that?”
The squad looked bewildered, but said nothing, and were brought back to the place where they were before. A minute later precisely the same thing occurred again. I really thought the sergeant would burst. I was preparing to hasten to the barracks for medical aid. But the paroxysm passed. Calling upon the combined forces of heaven and hell to sustain him in his trouble, he requested his squad, as man to man, to inform him of the reason why to all appearance they were dispensing with his services and drilling themselves.
At this moment “Columbus” barked again, and the explanation came to him.
“Please go away, sir,” he requested me. “How can I exercise my men with that dog of yours interfering every five minutes?”
It was not only on that occasion. It happened at other times. The dog seemed to understand and take a pleasure in it. Sometimes meeting a soldier, walking with his sweetheart, Columbus, from behind my legs, would bark suddenly. Immediately the man would let go the girl and proceed, involuntarily, to perform military tricks.