McGregor cannot bring himself to detest all the Bosches. After all, he says, they do stick it out, and their very stupidity makes some call on his generosity. But HINDENBURG, he is convinced, never stuck anything out, except snubs from his competitor, WILHELM, in the course of his uprising career; he makes no call on anybody's generosity, taking everything he wants, including (says McGregor) the best cigars. Without ever having studied them closely, McGregor has the most precise ideas of HINDENBURG'S daily life and habits. He is quite sure he smokes all day the most expensive cigars, without paying for them or removing the bands. He rose, says McGregor, by artifice combined with ostentation. While his good soldiers were studying their musketry, he was practising ferocious expressions before his glass. If he ever did get mixed up in a real battle (which McGregor doubts) he was undoubtedly last in and first out. However it may appear in print, his military career would not bear close scrutiny; for that reason McGregor does not propose to scrutinise it. And as for his indomitable will, he sees nothing to admire in the man's persistence, since, when he stops persisting, he'll become ungummed and, at the best, forgotten.
So said McGregor, and when I besought him to come to the point, he said he'd dealt with it, and if I had any sympathy left for HINDENBURG or his line I was no better than a slave-driving, sit-at-home-and-push-others-over-the-parapet Prussian militarist myself. As for the map, it didn't matter in the least where HINDENBURG took his old line to, since wherever in Europe it endeavoured to conceal itself his own little line would scent it out and follow it. And if the HINDENBURG line was more than two hundred miles long and the Rrobert James McGrregor line less than two hundred yards, still it didn't matter; for when a Scot takes a dislike to somebody, that somebody's number is up.
McGregor didn't say that last, but he looked it.
Yours ever,
HENRY.
McTavish (purchasing paper of posterless newsboy). "AWEEL, IT'S A 'PIG IN A POKE,' BUT AH'LL RISK IT."