I first met Private Quelch at the training depot. A man is liable to acquire in his first week of Army life, a nickname.
I remember the first lesson we had in musketry. We stood in an attentive circle while a Sergeant, a man as dark and sun-dried as raisins, wearing North-West Frontier ribbons, described the mechanism of a service rifle.
The muzzle velocity or speed at which the bullet leaves the rifle is well over two thousand feet per second-
Two thousand, four hundred and forty feet per second.
Why don't you answer these questions?
How were you able to answer all of my questions correctly? Have you had any training before?
No, Sergeant. It’s all a matter of intelligent reading.
The outside of a grenade, as you can see, is divided up into a large number of fragments to assist segmentation.
Forty-four
What's that?!
Forty-four segments
Shouldn’t you have started off with the five characteristics of the grenade? Our instructor at the other camp always used to do that, you know.