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Most barrack rumours die a natural death, but this one was confirmed by the fact that next morning the whole battalion, instead of performing the usual platoon exercises, was told off for instruction in the art of presenting arms. "A" Company discussed the portent at breakfast. "What kin' o' a thing is a Review?" inquired Private M'Slattery. Private Mucklewame explained.
Some day, if Providence wills, the tale shall be resumed; and you shall hear how Major Kemp, Captain Wagstaffe, Ayling, and Bobby Little, assisted by such veterans as Corporal Mucklewame, built up the regiment, with copious drafts and a fresh batch of subalterns, to its former strength. But the title of the story will have to be changed.
"Yes, they got him at Arras. Mucklewame is in hospital. Fortunately his chief wound is in the head, so he's doing nicely. Here is his letter." Bobby took the pencilled screed, and read: Major Wagstaffe, Sir, I take up my pen for to inform you that I am now in hospital in Glasgow, having become a cassuality on the 18th inst.
"On His Majesty's Service, my lad!" responded a hearty voice; and the postman, supplementing this information with a friendly good-night, wobbled up the hill and disappeared from sight. The punctilious Mucklewame was still glaring severely after this unseemly "gagger," when he became aware of footsteps upon the road. A pedestrian was plodding up the hill in the wake of the postman.
"I doot he'll be a prisoner," suggests the faithful Mucklewame to the Transport Sergeant. "Aye," assents the Transport Sergeant bitterly; "he'll be a prisoner. No doot he'll try to pass himself off as an officer, for to get better quarters!" Company Sergeant-Major Pumpherston is now Sergeant-Major of the Battalion. Mucklewame is a corporal in his old company.
Caesar, when he had concluded his summer campaign, went into winter quarters. Caesar, as Colonel Kemp once huskily remarked, knew something! Still, each man to his taste. Corporal Mucklewame, for one, greatly prefers winter to summer. "In the winter," he points out to Sergeant M'Snape, "a body can breathe withoot swallowing a wheen bluebottles and bum-bees.
A pundit in the rear rank answers him. "Yon's Gairmany." "Gairmany ma auntie!" retorts Mucklewame. "There's no chumney-stalks in Gairmany." "Maybe no; but there's wundmulls. See the wundmull there on yon wee knowe!" "There a pit-held!" exclaims another voice. This homely spectacle is received with an affectionate sigh.
This time Private Mucklewame leads the field, and decapitates a dandelion. The third time he has learned wisdom, and the beggar in the boat gets the bullet where all mocking foes should get it in the neck! Snap-shooting over, the combatants retire to the five-hundred-yards firing-point, taking with them that modern hair-shirt, the telephone.
However perfect your organisation may be, congestion is bound to occur here and there; and it is no little consolation to us to feel, as we surge and sway in the darkness, that over there in the German lines a Saxon and a Prussian private, irretrievably jammed together in a narrow communication trench, are consigning one another to perdition in just the same husky whisper as that employed by Private Mucklewame and his "opposite number" in the regiment which has come to relieve him.
Private Mucklewame, whose mind is slow but tenacious, answers not without pride at knowing "Nineteen!" "Weel, mind this," says the sergeant "Left files is always even numbers, even though they are odd numbers."
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