We then marched away to the lecture-hall to hear the adjutant on his favourite topic—’Customs of the Service.’ He was not a bad lecturer, and quite funny at times. We called him ‘Blasé Percy.’ He had been at Mons, the Marne, and Ypres. Half his nose was off; he had a glass eye, a dummy hand, a silver plate in his tummy, and a game leg. Poor chap! no wonder he was blasé. For all that, he was a sport, and had the Legion of Honour.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘when you’ve finished wiping your feet on the tables, I’ll start. You’ve got to go through it, so don’t go to sleep. My lecture is “The Customs of the Service.” When you leave here you will have commissions. And when you join your regiments, try to do “the correct thing.” Don’t lurch into your new battalion like an actor-manager looking for trouble. Slide in quietly, just like a little dawg. If you’re not humble by nature, look as humble as you can. When reporting to the adjutant, don’t have a woodbine between your lips and your hands in your pockets. He will eat you alive. When I was a sub. I saved myself an awful lot of trouble by cutting the English Dictionary down to two words—“Yes, sir.” If you’re not brainy, that’s quite a good scheme. The adjutant will mark you down as decent and harmless, and the men won’t know. Of course, this beastly war has upset our easy old system. You’ve got to be intelligent to please the newspapers. It’s a bit of a bore, but the best people are trying to do it, and it’s good to be in the fashion. At the same time, it isn’t the correct thing to argue the point with majors and colonels. They are big-bugs in the military scheme, and should an old gentleman announce in the anteroom that Macedonia is in Texas, or that Florrie Forde is the wife of President Wilson, don’t call him a liar. You will make him unhappy, and when he gets you on parade, he’ll most likely twist your tail. Use your brains, certainly; but don’t advertise them—that’s bad form.
‘A man is judged by little things, and it is very easy to discover a man’s temperament and schooling. For example, in one battalion to which I was attached, a gorgeous youth barged in and presented his card to the adjutant as if he were a commercial traveller. Mark you, he was only joining his battalion that day; but the adjutant was amused to read the following:
| LIEUT. TED TIDDLEWINKS, Esq., | ||
| 1st Batt. Bombing Buffs. | ||
| Tel. address: “Hustle.” | Red Villa, Tooting. | |
‘Now, that visiting-card was all right for “The Bing Boys,” but it was no good for an officer of His Majesty’s Service. I agree it wouldn’t prevent our going on with the war. And I am glad to say it was no indication of the real ability of dear old Ted, as he turned out to be. But officers are officers. We control the actions of millions of men, and it’s not at all a bad thing to make the British Army a school for etiquette and good manners. Ted, I may tell you, was an advertising agent in civil life. He simply couldn’t help getting that card printed. From his telegraphic address you will observe he was a hustler, and we can do with lots of men like him. However, the adjutant handed him over to me, and I got him to dump his one thousand gold-edged, red-lettered visiting-cards into the ashpit, and gave him a bit of pasteboard like this:
| MR TED TIDDLEWINKS,, |
| 1st Batt. Bombing Buffs. |
‘Thus was he shorn of all his gilt, his Esq., his Red Villa, Tooting, tel. address, and all the fripperies of Suburbia. No officer requires a brass band or a newspaper poster to announce his commission or importance. The uniform is good enough, and it’s a mighty good kit, too. Ted was such a good fellow, so willing, so generous, and afterwards so brave that we adopted him as a regimental mascot. He’s now a captain, a D.S.O. And what do you think that devil Ted is going to do next week?’
‘What, sir?’ I asked.
‘He’s going to marry my sister.’
‘Hear, hear!’