'The distance is six kilometres, so you're both wrong.' My tone was so familiar to the men that it stopped the wrangle, but it was not the tone of a publisher's traveller.

Mr Linklater cocked his ears.
'What's a kilometre, Mr McCaskie ?' he asked blandly.
'Multiply by five and divide by eight and you get the miles.' I was on my guard now, and told a long story of a nephew who had been killed on the Somme, and how I had corresponded with the War Office about his case.

'Besides,' I said, 'I'm a great student o' the newspapers, and I've read all the books about the war.

It's a difficult time this for us all, and if you can take a serious interest in the campaign it helps a lot.

I mean working out the places on the map and reading Haig's dispatches.' 'Just so,' he said dryly, and I thought he watched me with an odd look in his eyes.
A fresh idea possessed me.