CHAPTER IV

"Silence in the ranks!" shrilled the little button-nosed company commander to the men who plodded behind him, four abreast, clashing their hobnails on cobblestones. They were in France, on the road to Festubert. Captain Augustus Rump was the son of a moderately prosperous fish merchant in a town on the south coast of England. After a not-too-distinguished career at a far-from-famous public school--a career terminated by expulsion--young Rump was sent to Canada. "'E's just the sort for the colonies," his father pr…