r tongue, and stop to think about your 'going to,' you'll
find maybe that 'going to' has gone before you make up your mind, and
the only thing 'going to' will be you and your detachment; and its
Kingdom Come you'll be 'going to' at that. And now we'll try it again,
and if I find any more 'going to' about it this time it's an hour's
extra drill a day you'll be 'going to' for the next week."

He kept the detachment grilling and grinding for another hour before he
let them go, and at the end of it he spent another five minutes
pointing out the manifold faults and failings of each individual in the
detachment, reminding them that they belonged to the Royal Regiment of
Artillery that is "The right of the line, the terror of the world, and
the pride of the British Army," and that any man who wasn't a shining
credit to the Royal Regiment was no less than a black disgrace to it.

When the detachment dismissed, and for the most part gravitated to the
canteen, they passed some remarks upon their instructor almost pungent
enough to have been worthy of his utterance. "Him an' his everlastin'
'Cut the Time!'"

"I'm just about fed up with him," said Gunner Donovan bitterly, "and
I'd like to know where's all the sense doing this drill against a
stop-watch. You'd think from the way he talks that a man's life was
hanging on the whiskers of a half-second. Blanky rot, I call it."

"I wouldn't mind so much," said another gunner, "if ever he thought to
say we done it good, but not 'im. The better we does it and the faster,
the better and the faster he wants it done. It's my belief that if he
had a gun detachment picked from the angels above he'd tell 'em their
buttons and their gold crowns was a disgrace to Heaven, that they was
too slow to catch worms or catch a cold, and that they'd 'ave to cut
the time it took 'em to fly into column o' route from the right down
the Golden Stairs, or to bring their 'arps to the 'Alt action front."

These were the mildest of the remarks that passed between the smarting
Numbers of the gun detachment, but they would have been astonished
beyond words if they could have heard what their instructor Sergeant
"Cut-the-Time" was saying at that moment to a fellow-sergeant in the
sergeants' mess.

"They're good lads," he said, "and it's me, that in my time has seen
the making and the breaking and the handling and the hammering of gun
detachments enough to man every gun in the Army, that's saying it. I
had them