The Adjutant was for having Oswald moved on; we should be missing things presently, he warned—saddle-blankets, rifles, horses, perhaps the portcullis. However, the O.C. would have none of it; he maintained that this constant menace at our gates kept the sentries on the qui vive and accustomed them to practically Active Service conditions.
So all the summer the wigwam remained on the turf-patch and the sentries on the qui vive.
How Oswald existed is a mystery—probably on manna, for he toiled not neither span, and if he stole for a living it was not from us.
He spent his mornings in bed, his afternoons reclining on the bank behind his residence, puffing at his dudheen and watching our recruits going through the hoops with the amused contempt that a gentleman of leisure naturally feels for the working classes.
At the end of September, Freddy, the Benedick, finding himself in the orderly-room and forgetting what had brought him there, applied for leave as a matter of habit, and, walking out again, promptly forgot all about it. Freddy is given that way. Apparently the Orderly Room was finding time heavy on their hands that morning, for machinery was set in motion, and in due course the astonished Freddy discovered himself with permission to go to blazes for seven days and a warrant to London in his pocket.
He capered whooping home to his villa, told Mrs. Freddy to pack her toothbrush and come along, and the mail bore them hence. Next day the weather broke, the sky turned upside down and emptied itself upon us, the parade ground squelched if you trod on it, the gutters failed to cope with the rush of business, and the roads ran in spate.
The post-orderly, splashing back to barracks, reported the disappearance of Oswald and Co.
We determined that they must have been washed out to sea and pictured them astride the wigwam in a beam-roll off Kinsale, keeping a watchful eye for U-boats.
We had seven days of unrelieved downpour. On the morning of the eighth, Freddy and wife returned from leave, and, opening the front door of the villa—which they discovered they had forgotten to lock in the delirium of their departure—stepped within. At the same moment, Oswald, the hairy dog and the woolly donkey heard the call of the great spaces, and, opening the back door of the villa, stepped without and departed for haunts unknown.
Freddy in a high state of excitement came over to the Mess and told us all about it.