The second solution I offer is that his action was prompted by roguery; for even a very limited intelligence would have warned him that he would be captured if he ventured near either the water or the camp. It may be that when his reins hooked up he was on his way to the free water at Ramib. The third explanation is that he was a little daft. In a long and varied experience of horses I cannot really remember one so afflicted, though I had a pack-mule once that I am certain was a harmless lunatic. You may take your choice of these alternatives; for my part I incline to the second.
John Ridd’s rustic wisdom led him to express the opinion, upon the memorable occasion when John Fry was bringing him home from Blundell’s School at Tiverton, that ‘a horse (like a woman) lacks, and is better without, self-reliance.’
R. T. Coryndon.
‘THE PROGRESS OF PICKERSDYKE.’
Second Lieutenant William Pickersdyke, sometime quarter-master-sergeant of the ⸺th Battery and now adjutant of a divisional ammunition column, stared out of the window of his billet and surveyed the muddy and uninteresting village street with eyes of gloom. His habitual optimism had for once failed him, and his confidence in the gospel of efficiency had been shaken. For Fate, in the portly guise of his fatuous old colonel, had intervened to balk the fulfilment of his most cherished desire. Pickersdyke had that morning applied for permission to be transferred to his old battery if a vacancy occurred, and the colonel had flatly declined to forward the application.
Now one of the few military axioms which have not so far been disproved in the course of this war is the one which lays down that second lieutenants must not argue with colonels. Pickersdyke had left his commanding officer without betraying the resentment which he felt, but in the privacy of his own room, however, he allowed himself the luxury of vituperation.
‘Blooming old woman!’ he said aloud. ‘Incompetent, rusty old dug-out! Thinks he’s going to keep me here running his bally column for ever, I suppose. Selfish, that’s what ’e is—and lazy too.’
In spite of the colonel’s pompous reference to ‘the exigencies of the service,’ that useful phrase which covers a multitude of minor injustices, Pickersdyke had legitimate cause for grievance. Nine months previously, when he had been offered a commission, he had had to choose between Sentiment, which bade him refuse and stay with the battery to whose well-being he had devoted seven of the best years of his life, and Ambition, which urged him, as a man of energy and brains, to accept his just reward with a view to further advancement. Ambition, backed by his major’s promise to have him as a subaltern later on, had vanquished. Suppressing the inevitable feeling of nostalgia which rose in him, he had joined the divisional ammunition column, prepared to do his best in a position wholly distasteful to him.
In an army every unit depends for its efficiency upon the system of discipline inculcated by its commander, aided by the spirit of individual enthusiasm which pervades its members; the less the enthusiasm the sterner must the discipline be. Now a D.A.C., as it is familiarly called, is not, in the inner meaning of the phrase, a cohesive unit. In peace it exists only on paper; it is formed during mobilisation by the haphazard collection of a certain number of officers, mostly ‘dug-outs’; close upon 500 men, nearly all reservists; and about 700 horses, many of which are rejections from other and, in a sense, more important units. Its business, as its name indicates, is to supply a division with ammunition, and its duties in this connection are relatively simple. Its wagons transport shells, cartridges, and bullets to the brigade ammunition columns, whence they return empty and begin again. It is obvious that the men engaged upon this work need not, in ordinary circumstances, be heroes; it is also obvious that their rôle, though fundamentally an important one, does not tend to foster an intense esprit de corps. A man can be thrilled at the idea of a charge or of saving guns under a hurricane of fire, but not with the monotonous job of loading wagons and then driving them a set number of miles daily along the same straight road. A stevedore or a carter has as much incentive to enthusiasm for his work.