monocle into his eye and inspected the gilt-edged trophy with intense and deliberate satisfaction. I asked him to keep it as a souvenir of his having got me into the Regiment—(bitterly aware that I should soon be getting myself out of it pretty effectively!). After saying that I couldn’t have given him anything which he’d value more highly, he suggested that I might do worse than adopt the Army as a permanent career (forgetting that I was nearly ten years too old for such an idea to be feasible). But no doubt I was glad to be going to the Depot for a few days, so as to have a good crack with some of my old comrades, and when I got to Cambridge I must make myself known to a promising young chap (a grandson of his cousin, Archdeacon Crocket) who was training with the Cadet Battalion. After a digression around this year’s fruit crop, conversation turned to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s message to the nation about Air Raid Reprisals. In Captain Huxtable’s opinion the Church couldn’t be too militant, and Aunt Evelyn thoroughly agreed with him. With forced facetiousness I described my own air-raid experience. “The cashier in the bank was as cool as a cucumber,” I remarked. There were cucumber sandwiches on the table, but the implications of the word “cashier” were stronger, since for me it was part of the price of martyrdom, while for the Captain it epitomized an outer darkness of dishonour. But the word went past him, innocent of its military meaning, and he referred to the increasing severity of the German air-raids as “all that one can expect from that gang of ruffians.” But there it was, and we’d got to go through with it; nothing could be worse than a patched-up peace; and Aunt Evelyn “could see no sign of a change of heart in the German nation.”
The Captain was delighted to see in today’s Times that another of those cranky Pacifist meetings had been broken up by some Colonial troops; and he added that he’d like to have the job of dealing with a “Stop the War” meeting in Butley. To him a Conscientious Objector was the antithesis of an officer and a gentleman, and no other point of view would have been possible for him. The Army was the framework of his