full in more senses than one) had held the responsible position of
beer-taster to a regiment at Jaipurbad ("an ideal drinkin' climate,
Sir"), then, dismissing the old connoisseur, continued on his way
bedward.

It must have been one o'clock by then, a black wind-noisy night. As
the Babe turned into the home straight, he saw a light flash for an
instant in a big cart-shed opposite the Mess--just a flicker as of a
match scratched and instantly extinguished.

This struck him as curious; it was no weather or hour for decent folk
to be abroad. The Babe then remembered that the mess-cart was in the
shed, and it occurred to him that somebody might be monkeying with the
harness. He thereupon marched straight for the shed (treading quite
noiselessly in his gum-boots) and, pulling out his electric torch,
flashed it, not on some cringing Picard peasant, as he had expected,
but on three unshorn, unwashed, villainous, whopping big Bosch
infantrymen! It would be difficult to say who was the most staggered
for the moment, the Huns blinking in the sudden glare of the torch
or the Babe well aware that he was up against a trio of escaped and
probably quite desperate prisoners of war. "Victory," says M. HILAIRE
BELLOC (or was it NAPOLEON? I am always getting them mixed) "is to him
who can bring the greatest force to bear on a given position." That
is as may be, but, after personal participation in one or two of
the major disputes in the late lamented war, I put it this way. Two
opposing factions bump, utter chaos reigns supreme and the side which
recovers first wins. In this case the Babe was the first to recover. A
year before the War he found himself in a seminary in the suburbs of
Berlin, learning to cough his vowels, roll his r's and utter German
phonetically. Potsdam was near at hand, and many a pleasant hour did