This passage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his
inhuman delight in the hunting of man. If we look at it closely we
shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert
who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr
Hinchcliffe the engineer or in Dick Heldar the painter, and (2) the
extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author
to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born
sentimentalist in Learoyd's little touch of feeling at the close.

The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and
calm directions for getting a "good point" in bayonet exercise. The
bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a
reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the
practitioner and a maximum of damage to the subject. Disabling the
enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is
always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be
technical. Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards,
painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as
the "most poetical paragraph in the English language," or building a
bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as
the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special
nature. Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very
near to the professional view of soldiering. All Mr Kipling's soldiers
take their soldiering as men of business. This was what so terribly
astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that
after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and "wanted a smoke too";
and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr
Kipling's literary critics.