And all in vain.
"Why don't they take me, sir?
When I see these fellows with three stripes on their arms, and looking at them and wondering at them as if they were struck three stripes by lightning, and calling themselves Sergeants and swanking about and letting their men waddle up to their gun like cows--and when I see them, as I've done with your eyes--watch one of their men pass by an officer in the street without saluting, and don't kick the blighter to--to--to barracks--it fairly makes me sick.
And I ask myself, sir, what I've done that I should be loafing here instead of serving my country." "You've somehow mislaid an eye and a hand and gone and got a tin head.
That's what you've done," said I."And the War Office has a mark against you as a damned careless fellow." "Tin head or no tin head," he grumbled, "I could teach those mother's darlings up there the difference between a battery of artillery and a skittle-ally." "I believe you've mentioned the matter to them already," I observed softly.
Marigold met my eye for a second and then looked rather sheepish.

I had heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a Territorial Sergeant whom he had set out to teach.

Marigold encountered a cannonade of blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date, scientific, against which the time-worn expletives in use during his service days were ineffectual.
He was routed with heavy loss.
"This is a war of the young," I continued.

"New men, new guns, new notions.

Even a new language," I insinuated.
"I wish 'em joy of their language," said Marigold.