A certain Colonel Prioleau commanded the regiment at the time when Herbert Larkins enlisted into it; a soldier of the old school, at times fussy, testy, and sharp-spoken, but really a good-natured easy-going man. He was without much strength of character however, and not over-burthened with brains. It was not strange, therefore, that he should suffer his authority to slip a little out of his own hands. He was far from supreme in the body of which he was the ostensible head. English regiments are very variously governed. This is ruled by the sergeant-major, that by the colonel’s wife; in another, the general of the brigade or district, with his staff-officers, works his own wicked will. Some are, so to speak, self-governed, and the Duke’s Own was one of these. In it, the will of the body corporate, of the officers banded together like a joint-stock company, and trading under the name of ‘the regiment’ was absolute law. By and for ‘the regiment,’ everything was settled and decided. The regimental idea was a species of impalpable but all-pervading essence, which no one could resist. To quote regimental custom; to invoke regimental prestige; to talk of the credit of the regiment; to insist upon the maintenance of _esprit de corps_, were so many irresistible appeals, so many precepts of a powerful unwritten code universally accepted, and admitted to be binding upon all. In its highest form, this thorough-going devotion might be productive, as indeed it has often proved to be, of extraordinary good; but it was possible to develop it in the wrong direction, and this was to some extent the case with the Duke’s Own Fusiliers. It was generally understood in the regiment that its credit depended less upon its military proficiency than upon the dash it cut in the world.