in a route-march. The four ("reading from left to right," as they say
in high journalistic society) were Second Lieutenant Little, Second
Lieutenant Waddell, Second Lieutenant Cockerell, and Lieutenant
Struthers, surnamed "Highbrow." Bobby we know. Waddell was a
slow-moving but pertinacious student of the science of war from the
kingdom of Fife. Cockerell came straight from a crack public-school
corps, where he had been a cadet officer; so nothing in the heaven
above or the earth beneath was hid from him. Struthers owed his
superior rank to the fact that in the far back ages, before the days
of the O.T.C., he had held a commission in a University Corps. He was
a scholar of his College, and was an expert in the art of accumulating
masses of knowledge in quick time for examination purposes. He knew
all the little red manuals by heart, was an infallible authority on
buttons and badges, and would dip into the King's Regulations or the
Field Service Pocket-book as another man might dip into the "Sporting
Times." Strange to say, he was not very good at drilling a platoon. We
all know him.

"What do you do when you are leading a party along a road and meet a
Staff Officer?" asked Bobby Little.

"Make a point," replied Cockerell patronisingly, "of saluting all
persons wearing red bands round their hats. They may not be entitled
to it, but it tickles their ribs and gets you the reputation, of being
an intelligent young officer."

"But I say," announced Waddell plaintively, "_I_ saluted a man with a
red hat the other day, and he turned out to be a Military Policeman!"

"As a matter of fact," announced the pundit Struthers, after the