CHAPTER VI. IN THE BARRACK-ROOM.

Within twenty-four hours of his arrival in barracks, Herbert Larkins was bathed, cropped, clothed, numbered, and, so to speak, put away. His ‘rags,’ in plain English, his civilian clothes—invariably so called whether undeniable garments or veritable rags—had been exchanged for uniform, such as it was. A recruit, and especially in the fall of the year, when the annual issue of new clothing is near at hand, gets only things ‘part worn.’ So Herbert’s shell jacket, his regimental trousers, and his ammunition boots, were all of them palpable misfits.

He said as much to the corporal of the[95] pioneers, who helped the quartermaster-sergeant in rigging out recruits.

‘Too large?’ replied the corporal, contemptuously. ‘Wait till you’re at the extension motions, or at club drill, and you’ll wish they were more than twice as big.’

‘But my trousers are too long, and—’

‘It’ll be longer before you get another pair. Besides, you ain’t done growing yet. Two months on full rations, and you’ll be as tall as a hop-pole. How do you think your legs ’d look then? Showing half a yard of sock above the high-lows, and the captain ’d be safe to put you down for a new pair of bags.’

‘And these boots are far too loose. I can’t feel the sides even.’

‘You’ll feel something else afore long, I can tell you, and not half so soft as leather. Them boots! Why, flash Alick Nokes wore[96] them till he went “out”—and it ’d take a dozen Johnny Raws like you to make half a soldier such as him.’

Yet Herbert had really some reason to be discontented with his personal appearance. Always a trim and dapper youth, his patroness, Lady Farrington, had loved to see him neatly dressed, and had cheerfully paid his tailor’s bills when at Deadham school. But now, speaking exactly, he was not dressed at all; his figure was only concealed with clothes. His jacket was baggy at the back; the arms were so long that the cuffs came as far as his knuckles; his trousers, if they had been tied in at the ankle, would have suited a Janissary Turk; his forage-cap—it was before the days of smart glengarries—not yet ‘blocked’ and set up, fell like a black pudding-bag, over one forehead and one ear. His boots were[97] quite amorphous, quite without form, and they might have been void were it not probable they encased a pair of feet shaped like wedges of Cheshire cheese. So deteriorating was the effect of these incongruous habiliments, that Herbert Larkins seemed to lose his erect bearing and springy step; and as he reached the barrack-room, to which he was presently marched, carrying his kit-bag full of cleaning utensils under one arm, and his new knapsack under the other, he hung his head and looked utterly ashamed of himself.

‘Oh! it’s you is it?’ said the sergeant in charge of the room, who took him over from the corporal of the pioneers.

Herbert recognised the sergeant with whom he had had the colloquy at the barrack-gate.

‘So you got past the gate, did you?[98] Mind you stop, now you’ve got in. Don’t try and run off again with your bounty and kit.’

The suspicious sergeant scented a probable deserter.

‘I shouldn’t have come in if I’d wanted to go out directly afterwards,’ Herbert plucked up courage to say; but the scene was so new, and he felt so forlorn in his loneliness and his strange new clothes, that he had not much spirit left in him.

‘Don’t answer me with cheek,’ cried the sergeant, very sharply. ‘I want none of your slack jaw or back jaw. Hold your tongue, that’s what you’ve got to do, and do as you’re bid.’

‘Now look here,’ he went on, after a pause; ‘there’s your bed, and that’s your shelf; mind you keep them clean and proper. Don’t you try to lie down on the one before the right time, nor put what ain’t[99] authorised on the other. You’ll be for recruits’ drill at six sharp to-morrow; don’t let me have to tell you twice to turn out, and mind you don’t get straying away so that you can’t answer your name at tattoo roll-call to-night. Mind, too, what your comrade says; I’ll tell you off to Boy Hanlon because you’re much of an age; mind him and what he tells you, and he’ll keep you straight. Lads’—this to the room—‘have any of you seen “the Boy”?’

‘No, sergeant, not these hours past. He’s in the usual place, I’ll go bail.’

‘The canteen?’

Some of the men laughed and nodded, and the sergeant went off in search.

No one took any notice of Herbert, as he sat upon the edge of his iron cot at the far end of the room. Everybody seemed busy with his own affairs.

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But presently some one near the door shouted, ‘Why, here’s “the Boy”! Duke’s Own! “’Tchun,”’ giving the word of command as though an officer was approaching.

It was only a wizened little man, who might have been fifty or barely five. He hadn’t a hair on his fresh coloured cheeks, but they were much wrinkled as though he were prematurely aged.

Boy Hanlon was one of the oldest soldiers in the regiment. He had been in it all his life from the time they had picked him up like a waif or stray on the line of march between Exeter and Plymouth till now, when he had upwards of twenty years’ service, and was growing grey-haired. He had begun as a boy in the band, thence he went to the drums; by-and-bye he became a bugler, from which, although barely of[101] the standard height, he had been passed into the ranks. Now, as a veteran who knew his rights and what was due to himself, he gave himself great airs. No one was half so well acquainted as he was with professional topics. He could tell you the names of all the officers past and present, in the Duke’s Own; he was a keen critic upon drill from his own point of view—somewhere in the rear rank of one of the central companies; he could pipeclay belts to perfection, and had not his equal with brass ball, heel ball, boot-blacking, button stick and brush. But the chief source of his pride were his confidential relations with Colonel Prioleau, the present commanding officer. The two had ‘soldiered’ together all these years, in every clime, and knew each other thoroughly. More, they had stood side by side at the battle of Goojerat,[102] where the Duke’s Own had fought remarkably well, and they were the only two survivors of that glorious day. ‘Boy’ Hanlon—he got his soubriquet of course from his insignificant size—traded a good deal on that battle of Goojerat. He was perpetually celebrating the victory. For one single battle it had an extraordinary number of anniversaries. Whenever ‘the Boy’ was thirsty—and with him drought was perennial—he turned up at the orderly room and told the colonel it was a fine morning ‘for the day.’

‘What day?’ old Prioleau would ask with pretended ignorance, although he knew and really enjoyed the joke.

‘The great day, of course, colonel; the day of Goojerat.’

‘Why, it was that only three weeks ago; surely—’

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‘Well, sir, we’re the only two Goojeraties left, you know, sir, and I’d like to drink your health.’

It always ended in the same way—the transfer of half-a-crown from the colonel to ‘the Boy;’ the speedy exchange of the whole sum into liquor, the most potent description preferred, a free fight, for ‘the Boy’ was quarrelsome in his cups, a temporary relegation to the guard-room, from which he was sure to be immediately released by the officer of the day. When Hanlon misconducted himself he always got off scot free. Colonel Prioleau would never punish ‘the Boy.’

‘Where’s my towney?’ Hanlon asked directly he entered the room.

They pointed to where Herbert sat disconsolate; and the dapper little soldier, who was still trim in figure, and straight as a[104] dart, walked over to the lad and gave him a friendly pat on the back.

‘Now, young chap, you must brush up, brush up, and show yourself a man. We’ve to be comrades, you and I, and it won’t suit me to consort with a chap as is given to peek and pine. What do you call yourself?’

This was delicately put. Recruits do not always enlist under their own names; so Hanlon asked, not what Herbert was called, but what he called himself.

‘Herbert Larkins.’

‘Good; and not a bad looking chap either. Too tall—leastwise I’m afraid you’re going to grow—’

Hanlon, like many little men, hated those whose inches far exceeded his own. In the days when there had been grenadiers, it was his favourite pastime, when at all the[105] worse for liquor, to beard the giants in their own barrack-room. He called them ‘hop-poles,’ ‘sand-bags,’ ‘wooden ramrods,’ and other opprobrious names, and his onslaughts generally ended in his being carried, bodily, to the guard-room, under some stalwart soldier’s arm. Now that the grenadier company was abolished, he disseminated his dislike, and abused every private who was more that five feet six in height.

‘Too tall, unless you stop as you are. Gin perhaps’d do it; or whiskey; or perhaps “four” ale—if you took enough of it. Fond of “four” ale, eh?’

Hanlon’s eyes glistened with a toper’s joy as he mentioned his favourite fluid.

‘Ah! there’s nothing like “four” ale. I’m under stoppages myself,’ he went on, meditatively, ‘or I’d stand treat. But you’ll[106] have got your bounty, and the money for your “coloured” clothes. You ain’t got the price of a glass about you?’

Herbert admitted readily enough that he had the price of several. He had lost none of his schoolboy freehandedness, and he had moreover the wit to see that his new comrade might, if propitiated, prove an uncommonly useful friend.

Hanlon first made Herbert swallow some piping hot tea which was brought in just then, and gave him the whole of his ‘tea’ bread; Hanlon’s own appetite was indifferent; and then the two, amid the winks and jeers of the rest, strolled over to the canteen. The place was not over full. Nothing stronger than ale and porter could be sold in it, and the Duke’s Own generally preferred the Triggertown taverns. So would Hanlon, but he knew that a newly[107] enlisted recruit would not be permitted to leave barracks.

They had a quart ‘of the best;’ Hanlon called for it—and drank it, all but a glass; a second quart followed, and a third; and as the little veteran became more and more steeped in liquor he grew more and more communicative. He told Herbert all about the regiment; who were the chief personages in it; he spoke with awe of the sergeant-major, but of the colonel as a familiar friend. He described the ways of the officers, the habits and customs of the regiment, the chances there were of promotion for a smart lad who’d had any schooling and knew how to keep himself straight. ‘Can you read? good—and write? better still. If you can only cipher and do accounts you won’t have long to wait for a lance stripe. I’ll get it for you, aye and[108] more too. I’ll get you put in the orderly-room as a clerk, or perhaps the pay office. You shall be a colour-sergeant before you’re many years older; who knows, perhaps you’ll be sergeant-major afore you die. All through Joe Hanlon; poor old Joe Hanlon—Letshavesmoreale.’

From Hanlon drunk to Hanlon sober there was a great distance. The big promises he made so freely in his cups were all of them forgotten next day. Yet the little man was, in his way, a good friend to Herbert Larkins. In the days, arduous and often wearisome, of the recruit’s novitiate, the old soldier acted always as mentor and adviser. He taught Herbert all he knew. He helped him with his exercises, rehearsing the manual and platoon in the privacy of the citadel ditch, so that Herbert soon won especial favour with the[109] drill instructor of his squad; he took a pride in Herbert’s personal appearance, arranged a ‘swop’ for the misfitting jacket and highlows, contracted with one of the regimental tailors to alter the baggy trousers in his spare hours.

‘I’ll make you the smartest soldier in the Duke’s Own,’ said ‘the Boy’ enthusiastically. ‘You’re the right stuff; you’ve got it in you; you’re a soldier born, every inch. I don’t ask no questions. I don’t want to know who you are, or where you comes from, but you’ve got soldier’s blood in you; you come of a soldier’s stock, I’ll wager a gallon of the best four ale. I like you, lad. You’re free handed and open spoken, and you’ve got an honest mug of your own. I like you, and I’ll stick to you through thick and thin.’

The advantages of Boy Hanlon’s counsel[110] and protection were soon apparent. Herbert, thanks to Hanlon’s coaching, but aided not a little by his own native intelligence, and the excellent education he had received, proved an apt scholar in the military school. He soon learnt his drill, and was passed for duty much more quickly than was usually the case with recruits. Mr. Farrington, who had commenced drill at the same time, but who enjoyed the officer’s privilege of taking it easy, and who was somewhat slow of apprehension to boot, was still at company drill when Private Larkins, fully accoutred, and admirably ‘turned out,’ took his place in the ranks on guard, mounting parade.

It was with a beating heart that he found Mr. Wheeler, the adjutant, in making his minute and critical inspection, pause just in front of him.

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‘Fall out,’ said the adjutant curtly; and Herbert scarcely knew whether to expect praise or blame.

‘Colonel’s orderly. Report yourself at his quarters after parade.’

Here was an honour indeed! To be selected on his first guard-mounting parade, as commanding officer’s orderly—a post which, apart from the privileges it brought of immunity from ‘sentry go’ and a sure night’s rest in bed, every private soldier in the regiment coveted and esteemed—was a compliment which Herbert, and Hanlon also, appreciated to the full.

What befell the young orderly at Colonel Prioleau’s quarters must be reserved for another chapter.