[20] Permanent Military Police.
What a life for a man of breeding and refinement!… Fancy having to remember the sacred and immeasurable superiority of a foul-mouthed Lance-Corporal who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being who can show you a deeper depth of hell in Hell, wreak his dislike of you in unfair “fatigues,” and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a “canter past the beak”[[21]] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the “digger,”[[22]] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps just spell and cypher, is a monarch to be approached in respectful spirit; that the Regimental Sergeant-Major, perhaps coarse, rough, and ignorant, is an emperor to be approached with fear and trembling; that a Subaltern, perhaps at school with you, is a god not to be approached at all. Fancy looking forward to being “branded with a blasted worsted spur,” and, as a Rough-Riding Corporal, receiving a forfeit tip from each young officer who knocks off his cap with his lance in Riding-School….
[21] Summons before the Commanding Officer in Orderly Room.
[22] Guard-room.
Well! One takes the rough with the smooth—but perceives with great clearness that the (very) rough predominates, and that one does not recommend a gentleman to enlist, save when a Distinguished Relative with Influence has an early Commission ready in his pocket for him.
Lacking the Relative, the gently-nurtured man, whether he win to a Commission eventually or not, can only do one thing more rash than enlist in the British Army, and that is enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
Discipline for soul and body? The finest thing in all the world—in reason. But the discipline of the tram-horse, of the blinded bullock at the wheel, of the well-camel, of the galley-slave—meticulous, puerile, unending, unchanging, impossible …? Necessary perhaps, once upon a time—but hard on the man of brains, sensibility, heart, and individuality.
Soul and body? Deadly for the soul—and fairly dangerous for the body in the Cavalry Regiment whose riding-master prefers the abominable stripped-saddle training to the bare-backed….
Dam yawned and looked at the tin clock on the shelf above the cot of the Room Corporal. Half an hour yet…. Did time drag more heavily anywhere in the world?…
His mind roamed back over his brief, age-long life in the Queen’s Greys and passed it in review.