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Updated: April 30, 2025
There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and cheerful semi-pension restaurants where whole families, including, in these days, minor politicians with axes to grind and occasional young women from the boulevards, all dine together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the gurgle of claret, and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame the proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at those who wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters about like a drill-sergeant.
The weak-eyed girl had been called away for a moment, and Ralph stood looking into a cell, where there was a man with a gay red plume in his hat and a strip of red flannel about his waist. He strutted up and down like a drill-sergeant. "I am General Andrew Jackson," he began. "People don't believe it, but I am.
There was no relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war, going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical drill-sergeant.
It may be remarked here, that those strong country lads were in another respect people of whom more might have been physically made. Oh for a drill-sergeant to teach them to stand upright, and to turn out their toes, and to get rid of that slouching, hulking gait which gives such a look of clumsiness and stupidity!
What of the stupid of the company, who would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the drill-sergeant often said? A new fear made him glance around. He would not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear. But instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs.
I had risen through the several gradations of lance-corporal to full lance-sergeant to full drill-corporal drill-sergeant pay-sergeant and troop-sergeant-major without being once confined, or on any occasion reprimanded by a superior officer.
Some of our neighbors told us of a certain Mme. Kergaran, a native of Brittany, who took in boarders, and so my father arranged matters by letter with this respectable person, at whose house I and my luggage arrived one evening. Mme. Kergaran was a woman of about forty. She was very stout, had a voice like a drill-sergeant, and decided everything in a very abrupt manner.
Such wheeling, rhythmic coalescing and unfolding; accurate as clock-work, far and wide; swift big column here, hitting swift big column there, at the appointed place and moment; with their volleyings and trumpeting, bright uniforms and streamers and field-music, in equipment and manoeuvre perfect all, to the meanest drummer or black kettle-drummer: supreme drill-sergeant playing on the thing, as on his huge piano, several square miles in area!
Let me add, however, that if he is a man of ramshackle tendencies, the offices of drill-sergeant, cricket-referee and supervisor of table-etiquette which he has to combine with his ordinary tutorial duties will in time become so irksome especially if it is his lot to fall upon inferior schools that he will be disposed to sacrifice all his pecuniary advantages and chances of unlimited promotion for the sake of a little peace of mind and unhampered leisure.
Such rivalry to best master the manual, to hold the most soldierly stature in the ranks, to detect the drill-sergeant when, to test their attention, he gave a false command! And then the coronal joy of a reward of merit for efficiency and alertness on guard!
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