con hanging up
in the kitchen and a bucket of soft soap in the out-house. In the top
lean-to room where Tim slept, in the winter time the rain and sleet
drifted cheerily in through the cracks and covered the army blankets
which covered him. But he didn't lie awake thinking about it--boys like
Tim who help on farms start playing shut-eye as soon as they hit the
pillow.

Old Sergeant Gamelyn came of an ancestry which, somebody or other of
distinction once said--and very truly--is the backbone of the British
Army. To put it briefly, if not gracefully, "what old Gamelyn didn't
know about soldiering weren't worth knowin'!" He had the ten thousand
and ten commandments of the King's Regulations always at his finger
tips, and he and his people had served in the same battalion, under the
same officers or descendants for generations. There was Michael Gamelyn
who fell at Malplaquet; there was another Gamelyn who had served at
Minden; four Gamelyns served through the Peninsular. But only one came
through to Waterloo. Balaclava, the Indian Mutiny and Spion Kop each
claimed a Gamelyn, and when the British troops returned from Lhasa in
1904 they left one Sergeant Royden Gamelyn--resting in peace ten paces
to the rear of the Pargo Keeling Gate. Of course Tim Gamelyn grew up in
the shadow of these things. There was an old book in his father's oak
kit box which Tim loved. In it he read about forgotten drill and manual
exercises, the uncomfortable and graceless man[oe]uvres of the rigid but
redoubtable men who fought at Waterloo. Also there were pictures in
colour of warriors in three-cornered hats, high stocks and powdered
wigs. These men Tim worshipped. He had by heart the quaint words of
command in which Wellington's men were told to charge a musket with
powder and ball. And I doubt not that he could have taken a brigade and
marched them to the attack with the best of the old-time sergeants.

Then in August 1914 came the great war, and when Tim suggested going
into Dublin to see Colonel Arbuthnot about joining up to that battalion
through which all the best of the Gamelyn men had passed, his mother
tried to laugh. But Tim saw the tears running down her cheeks, as she
threw her apron over her head and went out to bring the clothes in off
the line. His father then flung out his hand to him and said:

"Good boy, I thought 'twas in you. Good luck."

But when Tim joined his regiment soldiering had taken many new turns.
The modern rifle