and honoured old age to so many young men; he was always dragging in rotten gobbets of verse, with foul undermeanings: "Soldier, rest, thy warfare o'er " "; Keep thou still when clans are arming "; "His tin hat now shall be a hive for bees,"-oh, there was no end to his loathsomeness. 66 "Speak for yourself," Claude often wanted to say. Let the fellow befoul his own nest, and not decent people's. What could an amateur soldier like that know about what a real soldier must feel? Yet Claude's scorching retorts did not get themselves uttered, only something dry and austere, like, “I suppose we all get our orders and have to obey them," or, "Well, if you don't mind, I'll get on with my work. There's a war on," said with a reproving stiffness. Then Claude would bite his penholder pretty severely. I fancy it was in the gloom following one of these indecisive engagements with Colin that Claude's eyes were suddenly opened, like Adam's and Eve's, and he saw that, for the high purpose of conflict with Colin, he (Claude) was little better than naked. If, now, he had a ribbon or two on his bosom, all the darts of Colin's flashy trashy wit would be deflected; Claude would be armour-plated, like capital ships; like generals, he would be able to score without saying a word, just by sitting behind the front of his tunic and letting it tell. Somebody said in his hearing that night that the King of Alania-we'll call it Alaniawas soon to visit our front. Claude listened. After dinner he cast a long passionate look at a framed thing that hung on the ante-room wall. It looked from afar like a coloured plate of the full solar spectrum, III. but it was labelled, "The Ribbons of all the World's Orders of Honour." Yes, an Alanian ribbon was there-a blue one, a beauty. Fie, thought Claude, upon this quiet life in a hut, yoked with an unbeliever. Swiftly he wrote to three uncles of his-wrote as he had not written since the days when he first perceived that the trenches were no place for him. The uncles were loyal ; Claude, if a babe in some ways, was no Babe in the Wood. And they were soldiers, and well placed for doing good deeds to a nephew. One of the three was in actual charge of the plans for giving this Alanian King a good time, vice somebody else who was ill. The King duly came. He was reverentially motored about from meal to meal, well in the rear of our front. And who but Claude sat in state beside the chauffeur, except when he -Claude, not the chauffeur leapt down to open the door! In this great office Claude bore himself meekly through three dusty midsummer days. On the third evening the King and his British guides, nurses, and gillies of every degree stood somewhat self-consciously grouped at Amiens on one of that city's desolate lengths of low railway platform. The guest was going away. Abruptly the fountain of honour was turned full on, and it played in the twilight. Nervous and kind, wishful to do the right the right thing by Britain, but not to keep one of France's trains waiting, the King dealt out Stars of Alania with shy expedition to all the British officers who had done anything for him. An A.D.C. stood beside him and fed the blue-ribboned trinkets into the gracious hand. Claude went in last. But, even when he was bestarred, three stars were visibly left over. The King held one of them, ready to shed. The A.D.C. was still holding an unmistakable brace. Somebody must have miscounted. Or else, as Claude came to believe later, the devil was in it. The fountain of honour looked like slopping over the edge of its basin. A little way off, in the gathering dusk, three British officers, not attached to the King's party, were standing, perhaps awaiting the train, perhaps not. The Alanian A.D.C. cast a look towards them. Then he looked at the King and drew the King's eyes towards the trio. The King nodded. "There iss," he said sweetly, "no British officer who iss not worthy." The redeyed train for Paris was now clanking out of the tunnel into the station. "Quick, please!" said the King, in Alanian. The unpremeditated vessels of the royal grace were informed. And the angel of this annunciation was Claude. To his unaffected distaste he found, on approach, that one of the three was Colin. Still, Claude's not to reason why, at any rate until later. He delivered royalty's summons. In three minutes the three remainder Stars had settled into their new, fortuitous homes, the King had peace in the quickening train, and Claude had briefly let himself go, on the question of unearned increment, and was hearing a little from Colin about the divine super-equity of the ruling that he who had borne the burden and heat of three full days' work in the vineyard should not receive more than he who had wrought for one hour only. "An hour!" objected the literal Claude. "Why, you only paraded for pay!" 66 Absolutely," said Colin. But he was too modest. That dramatic scene at the station had really taken some skill and pains to bring off. Drama, they say, is the art of preparation. Claude simmered and fumed. "Anyhow," Colin said like an angel, "it has all happily." ended put up three rows on the spot, if they've not got them now. The Samurai at the front would take care to wear nothing— they'd be like the patriciate we're getting in England at last, the fellows who won't take the peerages. I should wear dozens, but I'd be an artist about it. I'd paint like a Rubens and wear my own picture. I'd start from that deep Russian red with the bottomless lustre-the Cross of St George, or what is it ?-and fight it out in that key all the summer. Oh, I see red; I can hear it-whole chords of red, peals of it. Isn't any Grand Duke ever coming this way?" "Not that I wanted," Colin explained to me later, "this acrid Alanian blue blob. Red is the only wear, to my mind, on this obscene khaki. Still one has to take life as it comes. So I went to the station. I even took other trouble. Why should I have to, though Why should Claude have to eat dust all over the Pas de Calais before he can stick what he likes on his coat? Let's have Free Trade in all ribbons. Then they'd give real distinction. A man would write himself down just what he is, by the things he'd put on. All the born base-wallahs would None came. But some bird of the air must soon have carried to Colin the news that a mission of British officers, heroes of Mons and the Marne, was about to visit the Russian front. For Colin wrote, swiftly and well, to the proper person in London. He had heard that for this mission ten hardbitten fighters were needed; they had to have manners, know French, and be able to carry their wine. Colin answered the call of his country the moment he got it to come to him. It was, he saw, no case for delay. Empires perish. Before such another call came the Russians might have a Republic, and no decorations about, like the poor Yanks, IV. and then-too late, the saddest words in life, too late. Plenty of time later on, for Colin to prosecute his conquests in France. He took his stand now with the nine other courteous and capacious linguists. In holy Russia the primitive virtue of hospitality was so ardently practised that Colin came back crying out for a separate peace. No mere London season, he vowed, had ever made such demands upon the digestive force of the celebrants as this Muscovite joyride. Still, that profoundly lustrous red ribbon was his. He brought back, besides, a lot of good stories. One was about a Japanese colonel, an other guest of the Tsar's. In the Japanese Government's a Russian trench this child of plight. For, by way of good the sunrise had strayed from manners, it had to pretend to the side of his guides and fallen believe that the murder was in with four Russian privates. not got up by the Tsar. And, They were good lads from the to keep up this pose, a Russian country, simple but careful. Staff Captain, the guide who They were not sure whether had not succeeded in keeping the war was still the old one the Japanese Colonel alive, had with Japan or another. Any- to be given a Japanese Order. how, they considered it safer "The gaud," said Colin to the to kill a loose Jap. The faith- Job Lot Mess, "was a treasure, ful souls did it, and Colin de- a sovereign prince of enamels. clared that the consequent We ought to make more of Russian apologies to Japan the Japs. We ought to shift were a classic for young attachés the whole war farther East. to study, apart from their We might hold all the gorprimary worth as light fiction. geous East in fee. Churchill Richer still in comedy was is right." Claude did not hear this address upon strategy. Claude too had gone East, though less far. When left alone in the hut he had thought deeply about A.D.C.'s. Peace, perfect peace, was their lot in this war. They toiled not, neither did they fight: yet honour found them; beauty fell, as it were, from the air, and was caught upon their tunics. Claude, as the New World says, figured upon it. Then he acted. Nature may not have made him expressly for action rather, perhaps, for the contemplation of himself in some becoming light. But Colin's own devout self was not surer than Claude of the efficacy of prayer, directed to the right quarter. Had not he, too, seen the Red Sea cut in V. two, for his safety, and passed On the second day of the Battle of Loos, Claude rallied round this beneficent uncle. The new A.D.C. took the place of a wild young peer who had gone mad, and swindled and lied his way back to the head of an equally wild Irish platoon, then diminishing in the lost battle. The uncle told Claude about this eccentric: "Damn little fool! I'd just been thinking of putting him up for an M.C. I hope you'll know when the day, he was so moved. you're well off." Claude did. Like Issachar, he "saw that rest was good." And the Corps headquarters were pleasant. There would he see no enemy but winter and rough weather; and these are not lethal in well-built châteaux. He was not as many A.D.C.'s are. Some of the most contumacious of men are those who do little personal things for the great. Valets to Emperors, ushers to Solons, batmen to heroes-too often nothing is great to such men, and nobody either. Nearly all the most mutinous blasphemy that was talked during the war was talked in the A.D.C. rooms of the mighty. But Claude revered his chief. To him his uncle was one in whom the soul of the real army "lived on, pestered indeed but still nobly unswamped by the ragtag and bobtail of Kitcheners and Territorials. Claude could feel for the Corps Commander. Had not he too, for long months, endured the manners of Colin, the New Army man, in the wilderness? All things were well. Through "Oh my! I don't want to die; Then the road was vacant and white for a time, till a wailing of bagpipes arose, and a kilted battalion, dwarfed to the size of a company, hove into sight, marching the opposite way: four little companies like platoons, and few officers anywhere; the pipes skirling some fearful lament, almost animal, like a moaning or keening of primitive women over their dead; the men with a stiff savage gait of sombre defiance scorn of the enemy they had smashed, of the Staff that had thrown Scottish valour away, of the non-Scottish troops that had failed on a flank, of the non-Scottish Commander-inChief that had loosed the fool battle. Claude had not served him a month when the uncle sent up his name for a Military Cross. "You'll get it, too," he told him. "Whenever these lists of recommendations look a bit long to the people upstairs, they start lopping off Claude was no great hand names from the tail-end, and at reading that sort of print. work up. So I've wedged Still, he did make out someyours in near the middle, well thing. War was the great up." game: he saw that more Claude knocked off work for clearly than ever; he saw, |