George was away for three weeks. What he did all the time I'm sure I don't know, though I kept on reporting to my superiors that the necessary steps were being taken and the requisite measures were being initiated. When he got back he wanted to start in at once telling me all about it. But I said no, and insisted on getting down to the War.
"In making out travelling claims," I said, producing the appropriate Army Form, "care should be taken to comply with the instructions contained in the King's Regulations. We have a quarter of an hour before your breakfast will be ready. Let us deal with our more formidable enemies, the Pay People, first."
George is the sort of person who gets you into trouble on the very first line of any Army Form. Asked as to his rank, he told me he was a Second Lieutenant in the Army, temporary Lieutenant, acting Captain. All these ranks get a different rate of allowance. Which of the three was George in fact?
"A man of your age ought to know better," I said.
We were half-an-hour late for breakfast, and even so George hadn't got to the station of departure, as far as A.F.O. 1771 was concerned.
I determined to devote the morning to the matter, clearing the court for the purpose. Our Mr. Booth, however, who is intolerably precise and accurate in these matters, had profited by my absence at breakfast to collect a folio of relevant Orders and Instructions, numbered one to seventy-three consecutively.
It all sounds so simple, doesn't it? You get so many francs a day for subsistence, and so many francs a night for accommodation, in France; so many lire a day for subsistence, and so many lire a night for accommodation, in Italy. Ah yes, but you don't know George when he is in action. Not content with travelling in the dark, and so subsisting by night when he ought to be accommodated, and being accommodated by day when he ought to be subsisting, he could never make up his mind to stay in the same country for two days together. As to his constant movements from one country to the other, three times he had supposed he had finished with Italy and was due back in France; each time he had got comfortably across the frontier into France he had been recalled to Italy. Never once had he the sense to cross the frontier on the stroke of midnight, and so make a complete twenty-four hours of it on each side, and all the time the rate of exchange was varying by a fraction. But, as George said, it wasn't himself who was manipulating the rate of exchange as between the two countries, and courtesy to allied nations prevented him from manipulating the trains.
