Wednesdays were guest-nights in the mess, when the married officers who usually dined at home were expected to attend. The band played Gilbert and Sullivan music behind a curtain. In the intervals the regimental harper gave solos—Welsh melodies picked out rather uncertainly on a hand-harp. When the programme was over the bandmaster was invited to the senior officers’ table for his complimentary glass of light or vintage. When he was gone, and the junior officers had retired, the port went round and round, and the conversation, at first very formal, became rambling and intimate. Once, I remember, a senior major laid it down axiomatically that every so-called sportsman had at one time or another committed a sin against sportsmanship. When challenged, he cross-examined each of his neighbours in turn, putting them on their honour to tell the truth. One of them, blushing, admitted that he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘It was my last chance before I rejoined the battalion in India.’ Another said that when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. The next one had gone out with a poacher—in his Sandhurst days—and crumbled poison-berry into a trout-stream. An even more scandalous admission came from a new-army major, a gentleman-farmer, that his estate had been overrun with foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty miles away, he had given his bailiff permission to protect the hen-roosts with a gun. Finally it was the turn of the medical officer to be cross-examined. He said: ‘Well, once when I was a student at St. Andrews a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost and I never returned the ten bob.’ At this one of the guests, an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, became suddenly excited, jumped up and leant over the table, doubling his fists. ‘And was not the name of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now immediately?’