“Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?”
The colonel laughed.
“Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training.”
The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the “old man's” leg-pulling... No, it was clear they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.
XVI
In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne.
“Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. “England is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!”
“But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others.
“It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said kind-hearted fishwives.