General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith. For this soldier had been promoted on his bed of sickness. He had read somewhere that in his profession (as in most others) success quite often bred envy and neglect, but that to the unsuccessful, promotion and honour[43] were sometimes awarded as a sort of consolation sweepstakes. So, having been entirely routed and plundered by the enemy, it came to Hugh John in the watches of the night—when, as he put it, "his head was hurting like fun" that it was time for him to take the final step in his own advancement.

[43]

So on the next morning he announced the change in his name and style to his army as it filed in to visit him. The army was on the whole quite agreeable.

"But I'm afraid I shall never remember all that, Mr. General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith!" said Priscilla.

"Well, you'd better!" returned the wounded hero, as truculently as he could for the bandages and the sticking-plaster, in which he was swathed after the fashion of an Egyptian mummy partially unwrapped.

"What a funny smell!" piped Toady Lion. "Do field-marshals all smell like that?"

"Get out, silly!" retorted the wounded officer. "Don't you know that's the stuff they rub on the wounded when they have fought bravely? That's arnicay!"

"And what do they yub on them when they don't fight bravely?" persisted Toady Lion, who had had enough of fighting, and who in his heart was resolved that the next time he would "yun away" as hard as he could, a state of mind not unusual after the zip-zip of bullets is heard for the first time.

"First of all they catch them and kick them for being cowards. Then they shoot at them till they are dead; and may the Lord have mercy on their[44] souls! Amen!" said General Smith, mixing things for the information and encouragement of Sir Toady Lion.

[44]

Presently the children were called out to go and play, and the wounded hero was left alone. His head ached so that he could not read. Indeed, in any case he could not, for the room was darkened with the intention of shielding his damaged eyes from the light. General Napoleon could only watch the flies buzzing round and round, and wish in vain that he had a fly-flapper at the end of a pole in order to "plop" them, as he used to do all over the house in the happy days before Janet Sheepshanks discovered what 

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