The Adventures of an Ensign

“Fair sets the wind for France!”

This story, like so many others in England’s military history, opens at Waterloo Station. We shall abridge the formalities of introducing its central figure, for he can only claim attention in connection with certain military events in which he played a diminutive rôle. Indeed, save for the fact that he is wearing the service uniform of one of the Guards’ regiments, there is nothing to distinguish him from the thousands of other second lieutenants, insignificant even as he, whose share in shaping the destinies of the world on the battlefields of France and Belgium has likewise begun at one or other of the great London termini.

Here, then, is our Ensign—a colloquial phrase for referring to a second lieutenant of the Guards, for the title was dropped many years ago—in company with a brother ensign, his fellow-traveller, known to the ante-room at home as “The Lad,” and, like the other, for the first time “proceeding on active service.” They are going out alone—that is to say, not as part of a draft—and beyond the known fact that they are bound for the Guards’ Base Depôt in France, what military writers call “the fog of war” envelops their future.