A very tall young subaltern, with carefully up-curled moustache and tiny bronze buttons on his loose tunic, came up; saluted the Colonel; and said, “Are you Colonel Stark, sir? . . . The Artillery General won’t be here till two o’clock.” Then, to Peter, “Hallo, Jameson, haven’t seen you since you left. . . . Come and have a drink before lunch, won’t you, sir?”
Peter introduced “Sandiland of Impey’s” to his Colonel; and the young Guardee led downstairs to the foul cellar they had visited on the night of the twenty-fifth. It was no longer a charnel-house. Down the middle of it, a long table, spread with a white cloth, testified the imminence of lunch. About the table, talking quietly, stood other tall men, all in identical tunics, all with the same carefully up-curled moustaches, the same modulated voices.
They called each other by nicknames: “I say, Bunny, what about those smoke-bombs?” “My dear Trousers, don’t panic.” “Where’s the General?” “Is Muggins about?”
Sandiland produced gin and vermouth. Talk grew general.
Peter did not take long to recognize the peculiar social atmosphere. It was merely glorified Eton. Everybody trying their best to assume that facts didn’t exist; that emotions didn’t exist; that they knew little and cared less about the job they had at heart. It was over twelve years since Peter had lived in that particular atmosphere: but he sniffed it gratefully. His voice changed to it. He said, “Oh, really. Well, of course, _I_ don’t know much about Gunnery,” knowing perfectly well that he knew considerably more about it than Sandiland—and, “It’s been very quiet round the batteries”—feeling that nobody had ever been quite so heavily shelled as the Fourth Southdown Brigade.
The Weasel, who happened to have been at Winchester before going on to Woolwich, felt suddenly and immensely superior to everybody on earth. For, on that point, all old English “public-school” men feel alike: which is what makes them at times so insufferable to outsiders. If a foreigner had asked any of the men in that cellar _why_ he was fighting, the foreigner would have met with an incredulous lift of the eyebrow: that particular lift of the eyebrow which no foreigner understands; but which conveys—to one who can interpret—“My dear fellow, I was at Eton” (or Winchester, or Haileybury, or Harrow, or Radley or a hundred other foundations of that classical tradition which literary pacifists despise) “and _one does, don’t you know, one just does_.”