Everyone roared with laughter at this, and Tom tried to save his guest embarrassment by explaining that I had been soldiering there, and had pretty well won the war single-handed. He needn’t have minded, for Bismarck never turned a hair, but began to discourse on the Prussian Army, of all things, and his own lieutenant’s commission, and how he regretted that there were so few chances of active service these days.

“Well,” says I, “you can have any that come my way, and welcome.” (This is the kind of remark that folk love to hear from a hero, of course.) The fellows roared, but Bismarck frowned.

“You would avoid dangerous service?” says he.

“I should just think I would,” says I, winking at Speed. If only they had known how true that was. “Damned unpleasant, dangerous service. Bullets, swords, chaps killing each other—no peace and quiet at all.”

When the laughter had died down, Tom explained that I was joking; that I was, in fact, an exceptionally brave man who would miss no chance of battle and glory. Bismarck listened, his cold eye never leaving me, and then, would you believe it, began to lecture us on a soldier’s duty, and the nobility of serving one’s country. He obviously believed it, too, he rolled it out so solemnly, and it was all some of the younger men could do to keep their faces straight. Poor old Tom was in an anguish in case we offended his guest, and at the same time obviously nearly out of patience with Bismarck.

“I wish to God my uncle had found some other poor devil to bear-lead him,” says he later to Speedicut and me. “Was there ever a bigger bore and ass? How am I to deal with the fellow, eh?”

We couldn’t help him; in fact I resolved to keep as far out of Bismarck’s way as possible. He unsettled me; he was so damned superior. Tom was wrong in one thing: Bismarck wasn’t an ass, whatever else he might be. In some ways he was like that outstanding idiot Cardigan, under whom I had served in the 11th Hussars, but only on the surface. He had the same splendid certainty in everything he said and did; he looked on the world as created for him alone; he was right, and that was that. But where Cardigan’s arrogant eye had the shallow stare of the born fool, Bismarck’s didn’t. You could see the brain at work behind it, and those who listened only to his rather monotonous sermonisings and noticed only his lack of humour—of our kind of humour, anyway—and put him down as a pompous dullard were well wide of the mark.