ier, indicating an
inconspicuous and rather terrified private, just that sort of man whose
name one would never know or want to know. (It was something rather like
Postlethwaite, I believe). "Two paces forward, Private Johnson," ordered
my skipper emphatically, fixing an hypnotic eye on the youth, and
adding, to prove his accuracy, "Now, my lad, your name's Joh----?"
"----nson, Sir," concluded the victim. That night, at dinner, the
Brigadier told the C.O. that, among many disappointments, he had found
one officer who seemed to know the names of his men "almost better than
the men did themselves." In accordance with J. B.'s maxim about being on
the safe side, it was a company order afterwards that, when asked, all
even numbers were to be "Evans" and odd numbers "Hodges," till further
notice.

Talking about names, I was quite homesick for old London when, in
calling the names and regimental numbers of a party, I found myself
bawling angrily for "Gerrard, No. 2784."

Catering, as we do, for all tastes, we have in our rank and file a
serio-comic artiste from the lower rungs of the music-hall ladder. We
had a busy time with him at our Great Inoculation Ceremony (First
Performance) on Saturday. We could not put too strict a discipline upon
men into whose arms we were just about to insert fifteen million
microbes apiece, and our private was not slow to seize his opportunity.
He insisted upon his fifteen million being numbered off in order to
discover whether there were any of them absent from parade; he wished to
know if they had all their proper equipment, and whether each had passed
his standard test. As the needle was inserted into his arm, "Move to the
left in fours," he ordered them; "form fours--left--in succession of
divisions--number one leading--quick-ma-harch." (It was the same
humorist who recently took a strong line about protective colouring, and
put in an application for a set of khaki teeth.)

At the moment of inoculation we were all, officers and men, very
facetious and off-hand about it, but as the evening came on we grew
_piano_, even miserable. Mess was not made any less sombre by
Wentworth's plaintive observation that "the doctor who had succeeded in
making a thousand of us thoroughly ill and debarred us from the cheering
influence of alcohol was probably at that very moment himself enjoying a
hearty debauch."

The only effect of the dose upon me was to induce a rather morbid
contemplation. I recalled