Women never follow this ideal of monotony. Their husbands, their lovers, are the glasses through which they survey the world. Sometimes one wants spectacles, sometimes lorgnettes, sometimes field-glasses.
Dick was successful, splendid, heroically moulded. He took the eye and filled the stage. Archie was small and unremarkable. He hated emotion, gestures in any degree. Expression made him uncomfortable; and any display of generous sentiment, noble aspiration or lofty ideal he met with embarrassed silence. But he lacked the self-confidence that would have qualified him for the slightly unfashionable ranks of Strong Silent Men. Meeting him casually, he struck you as irresolute. 'Cautious' was really a truer diagnosis.
Like Dick, he was a Celt. But while Dick was the type that fills parliaments and places where they talk, Archie was the dark, inconspicuous sort that is only dragged from its holes in the hills into public by outside force.
His father and grandfather had practised at the Scottish Bar; he was himself destined for the same career, but circumstances, in the obscure shape of a handful of Serbian assassins, landed him in a gun-pit in a picturesque valley at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.
As an earnest young Liberal at the Union Debating Society, Oxford, Archie had repeatedly proved the impossibility of war under modern conditions. In August, 1914, however, when Europe had failed to realise this impossibility, Archie, after two days of more than usual reticence, announced that he was off next day to Glasgow. Pressed to give his motives, he muttered that he supposed it was up to one to join. As he didn't think he'd make much of an officer, he'd enlisted.
Before very long Gunner Sinclair was drafted out to Flanders to replace casualties. He spent an evil winter in the mud of the Salient where endurance found more scope than dash. When Spring came to the desolate scene, he was sent home to receive a commission and to train with a Kitchener division.
At that time things were going badly in Russia. Sukomlinov, the war minister, was suspected not merely of the incompetence that is demanded of a war minister, or of the corruption which is expected of any Russian official, but of an active intelligence with the enemy, not tolerable in the early stages of a war.
It was found impossible to supply rifles and small arms ammunition, let alone artillery and shells, to the hitherto victorious army of the Grand Duke in the Carpathians; and it became necessary for the infantry—rude, unpolished fellows for the most part—to troop over the top without rifles or artillery support, against a well-equipped and entrenched enemy.
To limit the retreat which unexpectedly became necessary, the Russian Government applied to England for guns and munitions.
The War Office and the politicians, realising the seriousness of the position, and standing on the well-proved maxim that, 'if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing half,' fitted out several batteries of more or less obsolete twelve pounders—old Horse Artillery ware—and embarked them to the aid of their allies. Second Lieutenant Sinclair was a section commander in one of these units.