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The speaker turned on his heel and swore.

“Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!” said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his papers. “D’you suppose it’s any pleasure to me to reject chaps of your build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we’ll accommodate you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like.”

Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding- school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered in lost echoes.

“I’ll leave you, if you don’t mind,” said Burgard. “Company officers aren’t supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!” He called to a private and put me in his charge.

In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.

“These are our crowd,” said Matthews. “They’ve been vetted, an’ we’re putting ’em through their paces.”

“They don’t look a bit like raw material,” I said.

“No, we don’t use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the Guard,” Matthews replied. “Life’s too short.”

Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand over some man’s heart.

Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted figures. “White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!”

“I know it,” said Purvis. “Don’t you worry.”

“Unfair!” murmured the man who understood quick-firers. “If I couldn’t shape better than that I’d hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He’s cooked.”

“Nah,” said the intent Matthews. “He’ll answer to a month’s training like a horse. It’s only suet. You’ve been training for this, haven’t you?”

“Look at me,” said the man simply.

“Yes. You’re overtrained,” was Matthews’ comment. “The Guard isn’t a circus.”

“Guns!” roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. “Number off from the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven’s three, twenty and thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six.” He was giving them their numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at the end of man-ropes.

“Knock down and assemble against time!” Purvis called.

The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns, which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I whispered.

“Huh!” said Matthews scornfully. “They’re always doin’ it in the Line and Militia drill-halls. It’s only circus-work.”

The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that was ever given man to behold.

“They look as if they might amount to something–this draft,” said Matthews softly.

“What might you teach ’em after this, then?” I asked.

“To be Guard,” said Matthews.

“Spurs,” cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and then the other.

“What the deuce are they doing?” I asked.

“This,” said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had inspected snapped them out again.

“That’s all the spur you really need,” he said.

Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes were told to ride.

Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make it easy for the men.

A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.