“Good luck, sonny. Write and let me know how you get on,” said Murray. “You’ll do. You’ve got the guts all right, and you’ll very soon get the hang of things. . . .”
“March ’em off, now,” he added. “Chuck a chest, and don’t give a damn for anybody,” and Bertram carefully collected his voice, swallowed a kind of lump in his throat, bade his wildly beating heart be still, gave thought to the drill-book, and roared:
“Company! . . . ’Shun! . . . Slope Arms! . . . Form fours! . . . Right! . . . Quick march!”—the band struck up—and they were off.
Yes, he, Bertram Greene, pale clerkly person, poet and æsthete, was marching proudly, in full military attire, at the head of a hundred fighting-men—marching to the inspiring strains of the regimental band, to where the trooper waited on the tide! If his father could only see him! He was happy as he had never been before in his life, and he was proud as he never had been before. . . . If Miranda could only see him! He, Bertram Greene, was actually marching to war, with sword on thigh, and head held high, in sole command of a hundred trained fighting-men!
His heart beat very fast, but without pain now, and he was, for the moment, free of his crushing sense of inadequacy, inexperience and unworthiness. He was only conscious of a great pride, a great hope, and a great determination to be worthy, so far as in him lay the power, of his high fate. . . .
No man forgets his first march at the head of his own force, if he forgets his first march in uniform. For Bertram this was both. It was his first march in uniform, and he was in whole and sole control of this party—like a Centurion of old tramping the Roman Road at the head of his hundred Legionaries—and Bertram felt he would not forget it if he lived till his years equalled the number of his men.
It was not a very long march, and it was certainly not a very picturesque one—along the cobbled Dock Road, with its almost innumerable cotton-laden bullock-carts—but Bertram trod on air through a golden dream city and was exalted, brother to the Knights of Arthur who quested for the Grail and went about to right the wrong and to succour the oppressed. . . .
Arrived at the dock-gates, he was met and guided aright, by a brassarded myrmidon of the Embarkation Staff Officer, to where His Majesty’s Transport Elymas lay in her basin beside a vast shed-covered wharf.
Beneath this shed, Bertram halted his men, turned them into line, and bade them pile arms, fall out, and sit them down in close proximity to their rifles.
Leaving the Jemadar in charge, he then went up the gangway of the Elymas in search of the said Embarkation Staff Officer, who, he had been told, would allot him and his men their quarters on the ship. As he gazed around the deserted forward well-deck, he saw an officer, who wore a lettered red band round his arm, hurrying towards him along the promenade deck, his hands full of papers, a pencil in his mouth, and a careworn, worried look upon his face.