This tale may
throw a new light on that argument.
Gerald Bunthrop was not a conscript in the strict sense of the word,
because when he enlisted no legal form of conscription existed in the
United Kingdom; but he was, as many more have been, a moral conscript,
a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting,
very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circumstance and
pressure from without himself. Before the War the Army and its ways
were to him a sealed book. Of war he had the haziest ideas compounded
of novels he had read and dimly remembered and mental pictures in a
confused jumble of Charles O'Malley dragoons on spirited charges,
half-forgotten illustrations in the papers of pith-helmeted infantry in
the Boer War, faint boyhood recollections of Magersfontein and the
glumness of the "Black Week"--a much more realistic and vivid
impression of Waterloo as described by Brigadier Gerard--and odd
figures of black Soudanese, of Light Brigade troopers, of Peninsula
red-coats, of Sepoys and bonneted Highlanders in the Mutiny period, and
of Life Guard sentries at Whitehall, lines of fixed bayonets on City
procession routes, and khaki-clad Terriers seen about railway stations
and on bus-tops with incongruous rifles on Saturday afternoons.
Actually, it is not correct to include these living figures in his
vague idea of war.
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