“Well, you needn't get so blasted hot over it. I ain't said nothing against your padre that I haven't heard from your own fellows.”
“That's all right, sergeant. That was before we got to the war. I'm not huntin' for any trouble with anybody, but if any one wants to start up anything with any one, sergeant, in this battalion, he knows how to do it.”
And this came to be recognised as an article in the creed of the sergeant's mess.
The bayonet-fighting squad were engaged in some preliminary drill of the more ordinary kind when Major Bayne and the chaplain arrived on the ground.
“We'll just watch the little beggar a while from here and go up later,” said the major.
As Barry watched the drill sergeant on his job, it seemed to him that he had never seen a soldier work before. In figure, in pose, in action there was a perfection about him that awakened at once admiration and envy. Below the average height, yet not insignificant, erect, without exaggeration, precise in movement without angularity, swift in action without haste, he was indeed a joy to behold.
“Now, did you ever see anything like that?” enquired the major, after their eyes had followed the evolutions of the drill sergeant for a time.
“Never,” said Barry, “nor do I hope to again. He is a—I was going to say dream, but he's no dream. He's much too wide awake for that. He's a poem; that's what he is.”
Back and forth, about and around, stepped the little drill sergeant, a finished example of precise, graceful movement. He was explaining in clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the pungency and picturesqueness of his speech.
“He knows we are here all right,” said the major, “but he would not let on if it were King George himself. I'll bet you a month's pay, though, that we can't get one foot beyond what he considers the saluting point before he comes to attention, and as for his salute, there is nothing like it in the whole Canadian army. Talk about a poem, his salute has Shakespeare faded. Now he's going to move them off. Watch and listen!”