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The disappearance of the Colonel and Gull was unemphatic. In England the splendour of the Battalion Headquarters was such that the two persons of the Colonel and the Adjutant seemed of themselves to be the source of an effulgence, a fountain of uncreated light. Shorn of battalion parades, an orderly room, any discernible function, they ceased to emit enough glow to be distinguishable from ordinary worms. Lacking any evidence whatever I must fall back on my imagination to supply the deficiency. I suppose, accordingly, that Gull and the Colonel without their orderly room, with a battalion mess to act as a suitable setting for their brightest jewel, the Prince of Wales, with the threat – the very vulgar threat – of a horse-whipping and no horse to share it, had to look round for some means of filling time to prevent its being filled by something worse. In this quandary I imagine they fell back on precedent, and in their search they discovered efficiency, ruthlessness, unpardonable failure. All that was required then was to find a failure. What could be a more glaring example of failure than the disaster to B Company? It was, my imagination tells me, only the work of a moment to draw up a convincing and suitably damning report requesting the immediate recall and dismissal of B Company commander.
They could hardly have been more unfortunate in their choice of a scapegoat. Dear, kindly old sweetheart that he was, our Major was formidably well-connected. He also had a most unforgiving disposition and a keen and aristocratic dislike for bounders; what is more, he was liable to regard people who boasted of their princely friends as bounders.