Some five years before, the Colonel
commanding had looked into the fourteen fearless eyes of seven
plump and juicy subalterns who had all applied to enter the Staff
Corps, and had asked them why the three stars should he, a colonel
of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed
bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified
mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. He was
a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took measures
[with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumour
went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a
crutch to the Staff Corps had many and varied trials to endure.
However, a regiment had just as much right to its own secrets as a
woman.
When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his' place among the
Tail Twisters, it was gently but firmly borne in upon him that the
Regiment was his father and his mother and his indissolubly
wedded wife, and that there was no crime under the canopy of
heaven blacker than that of bringing shame on the Regiment,
which was the best-shooting, best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest,
most illustrious, and in all respects most desirable Regiment
within the compass of the Seven Seas. He was taught the legends
of the Mess Plate, from the great grinning Golden Gods that had
come out of the Summer Palace in Pekin to the silver-mounted
markhor-horn snuff-mull presented by the last C.
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