“Can anyone tell me where Sergeant Osler is?”
“He was here a few minutes ago,” spoke up Fuselli.
“Well, where is he now?” snapped the lieutenant angrily.
“I don't know, sir,” mumbled Fuselli, flushing.
“Go and see if you can find him.”
Fuselli went off to the other end of the warehouse. Outside the door he stopped and bit off a cigarette in a leisurely fashion. His blood boiled sullenly. How the hell should he know where the top sergeant was? They didn't expect him to be a mind-reader, did they? And all the flood of bitterness that had been collecting in his spirit seethed to the surface. They had not treated him right, He felt full of hopeless anger against this vast treadmill to which he was bound. The endless succession of the days, all alike, all subject to orders, to the interminable monotony of drills and line-ups, passed before his mind. He felt he couldn't go on, yet he knew that he must and would go on, that there was no stopping, that his feet would go on beating in time to the steps of the treadmill.
He caught sight of the sergeant coming towards the warehouse, across the new green grass, scarred by the marks of truck wheels.
“Sarge,” he called. Then he went up to him mysteriously. “The loot wants to see you at once in Warehouse B.”
He slouched back to his work, arriving just in time to hear the lieutenant say in a severe voice to the sergeant:
“Sergeant, do you know how to draw up court-martial papers?”