t heart) as Raffles made a good
one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself. My ignorance of
matters military was up to that time unfathomable, and is still
profound. I was always a fool with horses, though I did not think so
at one time, and I had never been any good with a gun. The average
Tommy may be my intellectual inferior, but he must know some part of
his work better than I ever knew any of mine. I never even learnt to
be killed. I do not mean that I ever ran away. The South African
Field Force might have been strengthened if I had.

The foregoing remarks do not express a pose affected out of superiority
to the usual spirit of the conquering hero, for no man was keener on
the war than I, before I went to it. But one can only write with gusto
of events (like that little affair at Surbiton) in which one has
acquitted oneself without discredit, and I cannot say that of my part
in the war, of which I now loathe the thought for other reasons. The
battlefield was no place for me, and neither was the camp. My
ineptitude made me the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot
who formed the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would
have gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling devil
of them all, but never more loyally my friend. Your fireside
fire-eater does not think of these things. He imagines all the
fighting to be with the enemy. He will probably be horrified to hear
that men can detest each other as cordially in khaki as in any other
wear, and with a virulence seldom inspired by the bearded dead-shot in
the opposite trench. To the fireside fire-eater, therefore (for you
have seen me one myself), I dedicate the story of Corporal Connal,
Captain Bellingham, the General, Raffles, and myself.

I must be vague, for obvious reasons. The troop is fighting as I
write; you will soon hear why I am not; but neither is Raffles, nor
Corporal Connal. They are fighting as well as ever, those other
hard-living, harder-dying sons of all soils; but I am not going to say
where it was that we fought with them. I believe that no body of men
of equal size has done half so much heroic work. But they had got
themselves a bad name off the field, so to speak; and I am not going to
make it worse by saddling them before the world with Raffles and
myself, and that ruffian Connal.

The fellow was a mongrel type, a Glasgow Irishman by birth and
upbringing, but he had been in South