Scannock was speaking now, defending himself lamely, gutturally. The man did not understand, he did not know, he must be wondering what these people were so upset about. We took him, thought the colonel, for the first time in his life since he escaped from school at fourteen; we took him and we made him wash every day and take a bath every week; we made him cut his hair and shave and even, occasionally, clean his teeth; we put him in a clean uniform and made him change his underclothes every week; we made him eat with a knife and fork and leave the table clean; we made him use the lavatory; we made him do these things, but he can’t for the life of him, see why; to him these things are not yet the normal processes of life; they are silly, irksome, unnecessary things the Army is forcing him to do. And when he’s drunk, when he wets his bed, when he swears at another man who happens to wear two stripes on his sleeve, there’s nothing, in the foggy hinterland of that brain of his, to tell him he is doing wrong. When I sentence him it won’t be a punishment to him, but a blow struck at him by his enemy, the world. Justice has as little logic for him as a lorry charging down upon him from a Merseyside fog.

‘Twenty-eight days field punishment,’ said the colonel. ‘Ask Major Maddison to come in, please.’

He told Maddison to sit down, and watched him pull a chair up to the table.

‘Smoke?’

‘No thank you.’

The colonel decided to be firm with the man, but his resolution melted now that they were face to face. After all, he was a damn good soldier; the brigadier thought the world of him and even the divisional commander remembered his brilliant record as an instructor at the battle school.

‘There may be trouble about that grenade in the guard-room, Maddison,’ he said at last.

‘Why?’ Maddison asked coolly. He was short, alert and tensed as a terrier, hard and slim.

‘There’ll be an Accident Report Form going through.’

‘Did the sergeant make any trouble?’ asked Maddison.

‘No,’ said the colonel, ‘he came and asked my advice.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I asked him to forget the matter.’

‘For my sake,’ the colonel had said to the sergeant. Ill at ease with his officers, whom he regarded as gentry; as people a cut above himself, the colonel was on the most intimate of terms with many of his n.c.o.s. Alone, once in a while, with a sergeant or a sergeant-major, he would speak as frankly, confide as gratefully as a brother.