There was actually a bath in the place with water running in the taps. Jones, always something of a pessimist, shook his head when he saw the bath.
“Look here, all you boys,” he said, “this is no place for us. There is an unwritten law in this outfit that no man, unless he wears red and gold things plastered all over his person, shall have more than one bath in one month. Now I had one three weeks ago, and I am still—— but why dwell on it?”
Needless to say he was ruled out of order.
Just to show our darned independence, we decided to invite most of the other officers of the battalion to dinner that evening, “plenty much swank” and all that kind of thing. Would that we had thought better of it. Of course we eventually decided to make a real banquet of it, appointed a regular mess committee, went and saw the Paymaster, and sent orderlies dashing madly forth to buy up all the liqueurs, Scotch, soda, and other potations that make glad the heart of man. We arranged for a four-course dinner, paraded the batmen and distributed back-sheesh and forcible addresses on the subjects of table-laying and how to balance the soup and unplop the bubbly.
Nobody came near us at all. As far as the Town-Major was concerned we might have been in Kamtchatka. The Major had gone to the C.O. (after lunch) and told him we had “found a little place to shelter in,” and as the latter had written a particularly biting, satirical, not to say hectic note to the Brigadier on the subject of the Town-Major’s villainy, and was therefore feeling better, he just told the Major to carry on, and did not worry about us in the least.
Nineteen of us—Majors, Captains, and “Loots”—sat down to dinner. It was a good dinner, the batmen performed prodigies of waitership; the wine bubbled and frothed, frothed and bubbled, and we all bubbled too. It was a red-letter night. After about the seventeenth speech, in which the Doc. got a little mixed concerning the relationship of Bacchus and a small statue of the Venus de Milo which adorned one corner of the room, some one called for a song. It was then about 11 “pip emma.”
We were in the midst of what the P.M. called a little “Close Harmony”—singing as Caruso and McCormack NEVER sang—when we heard the sound of feet in the passage, feet that clanked and clunk—feet with spurs on.
A hush fell over us, an expectant hush. The door opened, without the ceremony of a knock, and in walked not any of your common or garden Brigadiers, not even a Major-General, but a fully-fledged Lieutenant-General, followed by his staff, and the Town-Major.
In our regiment we have always prided ourselves on the fact that we can carry on anywhere and under any circumstances. But this fell night our untarnished record came very near to disaster. It was as though Zeus had appeared at a Roman banquet being held in his most sacred grove.
The General advanced three paces and halted. Those of us who were able to do so got up. Those who could not rise remained seated. The silence was not only painful, it was oppressive. A steel-grey, generalistic eye slowly travelled through each one of us, up and down the table, unadorned with the remnants of many bottles, the half-finished glasses of many drinks. Just then the Town-Major took a step forward; he was a palish green, with an under-tinge of yellow.