"COMING EVENTS..."
"QUITE right for once, Moke. Young brothers are unmitigated nuisances," declared Hugh Holcombe. "If I hadn't been such a silly owl to let my young brother try his luck with my motor-bike, I wouldn't be sitting here in this muggy carriage. Any sign of Slogger yet?"
The youth addressed as Moke thrust his bulky head and shoulders out of the open window and made a deliberate survey of the road that ran steadily down the hillside until it merged into the station yard of the little town of Lynbury.
It was a case of somewhat regrettable inadvertence when fifteen years previously Sylvester's parents had had him christened in the name of Anthony Alexander; for when, in due course, the lad entered Claverdon College the fellows, the moment they saw his initials painted boldly upon his trunk and tuck-box, dubbed him "Moke," and the name stuck like tar.
He did not resent it, which showed tact. In fact, he rather rejoiced in the nickname. It harmonised with his slow, plodding, deliberate ways. Imprimis, he was a swot; modern languages were his forte, although he was no mean classical scholar for his age. Anything of a mechanical nature failed to interest him. He knew a motor-bike when he saw one, but that was all. Ask him "how it worked"—a question to which his companion would reply by a fusillade of highly technical explanations—and he was "bowled middle stump."
Hugh Holcombe was cast in a different mould. Except in point of age there was little in common between the two lads. Holcombe was tall for his age, and possessed the appearance of a budding athlete. Although in mufti—he was spending the last week of the Christmas vacation with an uncle at Southsea before rejoining Osborne College—there was a certain self-assurance that the natural outcome of a training that inspires manliness, self-reliance, and courage from the first moment that an embryo Nelson sets foot in the cradle of the Royal Navy.
And the still absent Slogger——?
Slogger must wait until he enters this narrative. Sufficient to say that the three lads—as yet mere strands in the vast fabric of Empire—were to make their mark in the titanic struggle that was to convulse the whole world, each working in a different manner to one and the same just purpose.
It was in those halcyon, far-off days preceding the fateful 4th day of August 1914. To be more precise, it was January of the preceding year. Little did hundreds, nay thousands, of doting parents then imagine that on land and sea, in the air and in the waters under the earth, would their sons risk, and often give their young lives, for King, Country, and Freedom's Cause.
"Not the suspicion of a sign," replied Sylvester to his companion's inquiry. "He'll miss the train if he doesn't buck up. Here's the guard toddling along the platform."