Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/16

 “Certainly,” answered Gerald, with the faintest hesitation. The line of argument was a little new.

“And what regiment are you going to join?” remarked another creation, with dangerous sweetness.

The bored man smiled slightly. “The one I’ve been in for ten years. I’ve just come back from Central Africa and cross the day after to-morrow.”

As I have said, it is possible that this small incident tended to make the disease of uniformitis a mild one in our hero’s case, and to bring home to him exactly what the pukka soldier does think of it all.

Time went on as time will do, and over his doings in the winter I will not linger. Bar the fact that he’d been worked till he was just about as fit as a man can be, I really know nothing about them. My story is of his coming to France and what happened to him while he was there till, stopping one in the shoulder, he went back to England feet first—a man, where before he had been an ass. He was only in France a fortnight, from the time he landed at Havre till the time they put him on a hospital ship at Boulogne;