He did not blame them; only after considering all possible grounds for their absence, it left him perplexed. What he did blame in them was their readiness to judge others, who had at least submitted to the test. It was rather as though they wished to make some vicarious atonement for their own lapse; but a man who has forgotten the obligations of loyalty should not set up as a judge. If this conventional notion of honour would not fit into the corporal’s scheme of things, he himself could safely discard it. It may have been very well so long as it had been possible to consider the army as a class or a profession, but the war had made it a world. It was full of a diversity of God’s creatures: honour, with some, might be a grace, and with others duty an obligation, but self-interest, perhaps in varying measure, was common to them all. Even in the actual ecstasy of battle, when a man’s soul might be torn suddenly from its scabbard to flash in an instant’s brightness, it was absent not for long. When one returned to the routine of camp and billets, one had to take the practical and more selfish view; and if a nice sense of honour were unable to restrain the antipathy which the Major and Captain Malet felt for each other, their own interests might be expected to provide an efficient check. It operated equally, where there were none of these niceties, with the regimental and the colour-sergeant, but here the interests did not follow the same direction. As the colour-sergeant was quite openly working his ticket, incompetence, if calculated, might even help to procure his end, and would be charitably condoned as only another symptom of his pensionable years. If he were out to satisfy some old grudge, he had his opportunity in the present condition of affairs, and the corporal was right; but after all it was none of Bourne’s business, apart from the fact that the regimental, when a sergeant-instructor at a training-camp, had been decent to him. Anyway, he had to go and see him now; and telling Shem he would be back in a minute, he moved off to intercept his man before he should reach the sergeant-majors’ tent.

‘Corporal Tozer told me you wished to see me, sir.’

‘Hullo, Bourne, your bloody luck has brought you through again, has it? Captain Malet has been talking to me about you. I think he means to tackle you about going in for a commission when we get behind the line. We are going back for a rest. It won’t be any bloody rest for me, though. I have to do the work of the whole battalion. I thought you might come along to my tent tonight, though as a matter of fact I haven’t a tent to myself, in this bloody camp. Have to muck-in with the company sergeant-majors. However, you come along about nine o’clock. There’s some buckshee rum. There’ll be a rum ration in any case at nine o’clock, so perhaps you had better come a bit later.’