had his drill-book by
heart, relied for orders on his senior officers, and took pride in
obeying them smartly. This seemed to him the way for a young
soldier to learn his calling; for the rest, war was a game of valour
and would give him his opportunity. Theoretically he knew the uses
of artillery, but he was not an artilleryman; nor had he ever felt
the temptation to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. His cousin
Dick's free comments upon white-headed Generals of division and
brigade he let pass with a laugh. To Dick, the Earl of Loudon was
"a mournful thickhead," Webb "a mighty handsome figure for a
poltroon," Sackville "a discreet footman for a ladies' drum," and the
ancestors of Abercromby had all been hanged for fools. Dick, very
much at his ease in Sion, would have court-martialled and cashiered
the lot out of hand. But John's priestly tutors had schooled him in
diffidence, if in nothing else.

His men to-day were in no pleasant humour, and a few of them--
veterans too--grumbled viciously as they passed the guns.
"Silence in the ranks!" shouted the captain of his company; and the
familiar words soothed him, and he wondered what had provoked the
grumbling. A minute later he had forgotten it. The column crawled
forward sulkily. The shadow of Howe's loss lay heavy on it, and a
sense that his life had been flung away. They had been marched into
a jungle and marched back again, with nothing to show for it but
twenty-four wasted hours. On they crawled beneath the sweltering
July heat; and coming to the bridge, found more delays.

Bradstreet and his men had worked like heroes, but the bridge would
not be ready to carry troops before the early morning. A wooden
saw-mill stood beside it, melancholy and deserted; and here the
General took up his quarters, while the army cooked its supper and
disposed itself for the night in the trampled clearing around the
mill and in the forest beyond. The 46th lay close alongside the
river, and the noise of Bradstreet's hammers on the bridge kept
John for a long while awake and staring up at the high eastern
ridges, black as ink against the radiance of a climbing moon.
In the intervals of hammering, the swirl of the river kept tune in
his ears with the whir-r-r of a saw in the rear of the mill, slicing
up the last planks for the bridge. There was a mill in the valley at
home, and he had heard it a hundred times making just such music with
the stream that ran down from Da