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Updated: May 19, 2025
The sergeant-major looked impatiently for some sign of the doctor's arrival. The other two wounded men seemed in less serious case. The bombardier regained consciousness as the brandy touched his lips; he took a good mouthful, and answered the sergeant-major's question as to his condition with: "All right, sir. Only my left leg feels a bit queer. I must have given it a wrench."
"Oh, sergeant," he said familiarly; "I think the others have got the right stuff in them." The company went into the barracks and waited. The sergeant-major's office was full of a clicking of typewriters, and was overheated by a black stove that stood in the middle of the floor, letting out occasional little puffs of smoke from a crack in the stove pipe.
Bumped, banged, bucketed, thrown, sore from head to foot, raw-kneed, laughed at, lashed by the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major's cruel tongue, blind and sick with dust and pain and rage, he had at last turned his horse inward from his place in the ride to the centre of the School, and dismounted.
Between the thunder-claps of the gun the Sergeant-Major's megaphone bellowed, 'Number Six, check your lay. Number Six missed the message, but the nearest gun caught the word and passed it along. The Section Commander heard, saluted to show he had heard and understood, and ran himself to check the layer's aim. Up to now the Battery had worked without coming under any serious fire.
So much so, in fact that he could have had almost any job that it lay in the sergeant-major's power to offer him. One day Louis casually mentioned that he wished he could get nearer the engine work, and the sergeant-major at once decided the boy should have his wish.
Before guard-mounting almost half an hour before his usual time for appearing at the office Colonel Maynard hurried in to his desk, sent the orderly for Captain Chester, and then the clerks in the sergeant-major's room heard him close and lock the door.
There was a knock at the door. The battery tailor had brought the sergeant-major's tunic, on the sleeve of which he had stitched the double stripes. Ida took it from him and hung it up silently. The invalid watched her indifferently. A short time before she had been mildly excited with joy at her husband's promotion; he had quite spoilt this feeling for her. Now she was callous to everything.
Then he locked up, and knocked at the deputy sergeant-major's door, in order to give up the keys. Frau Heppner was alone. "Are you just going, Herr Schumann?" she asked softly. The sergeant-major nodded, and said: "I am putting the keys here, in front of the looking-glass." Then he went up to the sofa on which the invalid was lying and took her hand. "Good-bye, Frau Heppner."
"Morning, ma'am, morning! Don't let me intrude. I'd a little accident, and took a liberty. Twenty minutes will see it right as a trivet. Then I'm off again I've a job of work." He stood with back to the sun and hands on his hips, looking up at Tess a man of fifty a soldier of another generation, in a white uniform something like a British sergeant-major's of the days before the Mutiny.
The Battery Commander took the telephone himself and sent the telephonist to help the guns; and when a bursting shell tore out one side of the sandbags of the dug-out the Battery Commander rescued himself and the instrument from the wreckage, mended the broken wire, and sat in the open, alternately listening at the receiver and yelling exhortation and advice to the gunners through the Sergeant-Major's megaphone.
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