breakfast each officer upon entering
sits down and shouts loudly, to a being concealed behind a screen, for
food, which is speedily forthcoming. Are we entitled to clamour in
this peremptory fashion too? Or should we creep round behind the
screen and take what we can get? Or should we sit still, and wait till
we are served? We try the last expedient first, and get nothing. Then
we try the second, and are speedily convinced, by the demeanour of the
gentleman behind the screen, that we have committed the worst error of
which we have yet been guilty.

There are other problems--saluting, for instance. On the parade ground
this is a simple matter enough; for there the golden rule appears
to be--When in doubt, salute! The Colonel calls up his four Company
Commanders. They salute. He instructs them to carry on this morning
with coal fatigues and floor-scrubbing. The Company Commanders salute,
and retire to their Companies, and call up their subalterns, who
salute. They instruct these to carry on this morning with coal
fatigues and floor-scrubbing. The sixteen subalterns salute, and
retire to their platoons. Here they call up their Platoon Sergeants,
who salute. They instruct these to carry on this morning with coal
fatigues and floor-scrubbing. The Platoon Sergeants salute, and
issue commands to the rank and file. The rank and file, having no
instructions to salute sergeants, are compelled, as a last resort, to
carry on with the coal fatigues and floor-scrubbing themselves. You
see, on parade saluting is simplicity itself.

But we are not always on parade; and then more subtle problems arise.
Some of those were discussed one day by four junior officers, who sat
upon a damp and slippery bank by a muddy roadside during a "fall-out"
in a route-march. The four ("reading from left to right," as they say
in high journalistic society) were Second Lieutenant Little, Second
Lieutenant Waddell, Second Lieutenant Cockerell, and Lieutenant
Struthers, surnamed "Highbrow." Bobby we know. Waddell was a
slow-moving but pertinacious student of the science of war from the
kingdom of Fife. Cockerell came straight from a crack public-school
corps, where he had been a cadet officer; so nothing in the heaven
above or the earth beneath was hid from him. Struthers owed his
superior rank to the fact that in the far back ages, before the days
of the O.T.C., he had held a commission in a University Corps. He was
a scholar of his College, and was an ex