Chapter 9 - Page 2

suggestion
of various exercises upon the mind.

"It is surprising how bloodthirsty one feels in a bayonet charge. We
have to shout; we are encouraged to shout. The effect is to paralyse
one's higher centres. One ceases to question--anything. One becomes a
'bayoneteer.' As I go bounding forward I imagine fat men, succulent men
ahead, and I am filled with the desire to do them in neatly. This sort
of thing--"

A sketch of slaughter followed, with a large and valiant Hugh leaving a
train of fallen behind him.

"Not like this. This is how I used to draw it in my innocent childhood,
but it is incorrect. More than one German on the bayonet at a time is an
incumbrance. And it would be swank--a thing we detest in the army."

The second sketch showed the same brave hero with half a dozen of the
enemy skewered like cat's-meat.

"As for the widows and children, I disregard 'em."

Section 2

But presently Hugh began to be bored.

"Route marching again," he wrote. "For no earthly reason than that they
can do nothing else with us. We are getting no decent musketry training
because there are no rifles. We are wasting half our time. If you
multiply half a week by the number of men in the army you will see we
waste centuries weekly.... If most of these men here had just been
enrolled and left to go about their business while we trained officers
and instructors and got equipment for them, and if they had then been
put through their paces as rapidly as possible, it would have been
infinitely better for the country.... In a sort of way we are keeping
raw; in a sort of way we are getting stale.... I get irritated by this.
I feel we are not being properly done by.

"Half our men are educated men, reasonably educated, but we are always
being treated as though we were too stupid for words....

"No good grousing, I suppose, but after Statesminster and a glimpse of
old Cardinal's way of doing things, one gets a kind of toothache in the
mind at the sight of everything being done twice as slowly and half as
well as it need be."

He went off at a tangent to describe the men in his platoon. "The best
man in our lot is an ex-grocer's assistant, but in order to save us from
vain generalisations it happens that the worst man--a moon-faced
creature, almost incapable of lacing up his boots without help and
objurgation--is also an ex-grocer's assistant. Our most offensive member
is a little cad with a snub nose, who has read Kipling and imagines he
is the nearest thing that ever has been to Private Ortheris. He goes
about looking for the other two of the Soldiers Three; it is rather like
an unpopular politician trying to form a