out of the harness when up came Mad Harry, one of our "leftenants",
and ordered us out for foot inspection.

I don't want to say anything unfair about this man. He is dead now.
I saw him die. He was brave. He knew his job all right, but he was
a fine example of what an officer ought not to be. The only reason
I speak of him is because I want to say something about officers in
general.

This Mad Harry,--I do not give his surname for obvious
reasons,--was the son of one of the richest-new-rich-merchant
families in England. He was very highly educated, had, I take it,
spent the most of his life with the classics. He was long and thin
and sallow and fish-eyed. He spoke in a low colorless monotone,
absolutely without any inflection whatever. The men thought he was
balmy. Hence the nickname Mad Harry.

Mad Harry was a fiend for walking. And at the end of a twenty-mile
hike in heavy marching order he would casually stroll alongside
some sweating soldier and drone out,

"I say, Private Stetson. Don't you just love to hike?"

Then and there he made a lifelong personal enemy of Private
Stetson. In the same or similar ways he made personal enemies of
every private soldier he came in contact with.

It may do no harm to tell how Mad Harry died. He came very near
being shot by one of his own men.