“He’s harmless.” Murray spoke with his customary mildness.

“He’s a jumped-up bloody nothing.”

Murray smiled. “He’s a damned efficient Quartermaster, Warren. When did your men last have so much ammunition?”

“His job is to arrange my bed for tonight, not loiter here in the hope of proving how well he can fight. Look at him!” Dunnett, like a man with an itching sore that he could not stop scratching, stared at the Quartermaster. “He thinks he’s still in the ranks, doesn’t he? Once a peasant, always one, that’s what I say. Why’s he carrying a rifle?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

The rifle was the Quartermaster’s eccentricity, and an unfitting one, for a Quartermaster needed lists and ink and quills and tally-sticks, not a weapon. He needed to be able to forage for food or ferret out shelters in apparently overcrowded billets. He needed a nose to smell out rotten beef, scales to weigh ration flour, and stubbornness to resist the depredations of other Quartermasters. He did not need weapons, yet the new Lieutenant always carried a rifle as well as his regulation sabre. The two weapons seemed to be a statement of intent; that he wanted to fight rather than be a Quartermaster, yet to most of the greenjackets the weapons were a rather pathetic pretension carried by a man who, whatever his past, was now nothing more than an ageing Lieutenant.

Dunnett stamped his cold feet on the road. “I’ll send the flank companies back first, Johnny. You can cover.”

“Yes, sir. Do we wait for our horse?”

“Bugger the cavalry.” Dunnett offered the infantryman’s automatic scorn of the mounted arm. “I’m waiting five more minutes. It can’t take this long to clear some bloody guns off the road. Do you see anything, Quartermaster?” The question was asked mockingly.