‘What I grudge,’ a sergeant struck in, ‘is havin’ to put mechanics to loading and unloading beef. That’s where modified conscription for the beauties that won’t roll up ‘ld be useful to us. We want hewers of wood, we do. And I’d hew ‘em!’
‘I want that file.’ This was a private in a hurry, come from beneath an unspeakable Bulford. Some one asked him musically if he ‘would tell his wife in the morning who he was with to-night.’
‘You’ll find it in the tool-chest,’ said the sergeant. It was his own sacred tool-chest which he had contributed to the common stock.
‘And what sort of men have you got in this unit?’ I asked.
‘Every sort you can think of. There isn’t a thing you couldn’t have made here if you wanted to. But’—the corporal, who had been a fitter, spoke with fervour—‘you can’t expect us to make big-ends, can you? That five-ton Bulford lorry out there in the wet——’
‘And she isn’t the worst,’ said the master builder. ‘But it’s all part of the game. And so funny when you come to think of it. Me painting carts, and certificated plumbers loading frozen beef!’
‘What about the discipline?’ I asked.
The corporal turned a fitter’s eye on me. ‘The mechanism is the discipline,’ said he, with most profound truth, ‘Jockeyin’ a sick car on the road is discipline, too. What about the discipline?’ He turned to the sergeant with the carpenter’s chest. There was one sergeant of Regulars, with twenty years’ service behind him and a knowledge of human nature. He struck in.
‘You ought to know. You’ve just been made corporal,’ said that sergeant of Regulars.
‘Well, there’s so much which everybody knows has got to be done that—that—why, we all turn in and do it,’ quoth the corporal, ‘I don’t have any trouble with my lot.’