That was after Colonel Woodcote had been wounded: since he had gone, and the old adjutant, Captain Everall, things had not been the same. The old lot had all kept together, and the men knew them, or knew of them, even before the war: but Major Shadwell and Captain Malet were the only two left of the old lot. Regular officers as a rule didn’t understand the new armies, they had the model of the old professional army always in their mind’s eye, and they talked of the fire-discipline of the old army, and the rate of fire they were able to maintain in repelling counter-attacks, saying that reliance on bombs had ruined musketry. They forgot how the war had changed since 1915, ignoring artillery developments: and it never occurred to them that if one Lewis gun could do the work of ten men, it was rather foolish not to prefer it, since it offered a smaller target. The majority of them, though there were brilliant exceptions, did not understand that the kind of discipline they wished to apply to these improvised armies was only a brake on their impetus. Then again, as a rule the regular officers did not get on with the temporary officers of the new army; but the regular army, perfect as it was, was a very small affair: things were now on a different scale, and in these new conditions the regular officer was as much an amateur as his temporary comrades. After a few minutes, Bourne went back to his place, and the orderly-room was calm again.

Captain Malet returned to duty that afternoon, and on the following day he was one of the principals in another scene. When Brigade ordered the battalion to provide a working-party for that night, it was discovered that in the state supplied to Brigade by the orderly-room, the strength of companies returned was not the fighting-strength but the ration-strength, and the demands made by Brigade, on the basis of the figures supplied, could only be met by taking every available man, even to the companies’ cooks. The M.O. was one of the first to complain, with regard to his orderlies, and various specialist officers followed him. One of the penalties of infallibility is that it cannot remedy its mistakes, because it cannot admit having made them; and Captain Havelock was embarrassed but inflexible. Then Captain Malet arrived on the scene, quite ready to fight anything and principle be damned.

‘Do you intend, sir, to take my cooks?’

The adjutant saw no other way.

‘I am not going to allow my men to suffer because of some damned incompetence in the orderly-room. Do you understand that if the cooks go up the line on this working-party, the men will not even have any hot tea when they come back, at about three in the morning, exhausted?’

The adjutant tried to assert himself, but the angry officer would not let him speak.

‘You haven’t got the moral courage to stand up for your own men, or to admit your silly blunder. Well, I shall tell you what I shall do. I shall order my horse, and take two orderlies and go up to inspect trenches. I shall see you are two men short anyway, and fuck Brigade!’