We went to the dismantled company office, where I found a window newly broken since the barrack-damages book was completed. ‘Wind-in-the-night, Sir,’ said the Sergeant-Major.

(All breakages were thus attributable or ‘to ‘Sappers’-demonstration, Sir.’) Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the company two months.  The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his work and would sometimes ‘address them individually as ‘George’ at stand-easies, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.

The new colonel had been with us less than a week at the time and we had not yet taken his measure. He had been standing rounds of gin in the ante-room and was slightly boisterous when he first took notice of Hooper.  That young officer is one of yours, isn’t he, Ryder?’ he said to me. ‘His hair wants cutting.

‘It does, sir,’ I said. It did. ‘I’ll see that it’s done.’

The colonel drank more gin and began to stare at Hooper, saying audibly, ‘My God, the officers they send us now!’

Hooper seemed to obsess the colonel that evening. After dinner he suddenly said very loudly: ‘In my late regiment if a young officer turned up like that, the other subalterns would bloody well have cut his hair for him.’

No one showed any enthusiasm for this sport, and our lack of response seemed to inflame the colonel. ‘You.’ he said, turning to a decent boy in ‘A’ Company, ‘go and get a pair of scissors and cut that young officer’s hair for him.’ ‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘It’s your commanding officer’s wish and that’s the best kind of order I know.’

‘Very good, sir.’

And so, in an atmosphere of chilly embarrassment, Hooper sat in a chair while a few snips were made at the back of his head. At the beginning of the operation I left the ante-room, and later apologized to Hooper for his reception. ‘It’s not the sort of thing that usually happens in this regiment,’ I said.

‘Oh, no hard feelings,’ said Hooper. ‘I can take a bit of sport.’ Hooper had no illusions about the Army - or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe.

He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said, ‘like the measles’. Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthusside; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry - that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man - Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon - these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

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