As Jinks waved his
stick in the air to illustrate the glory of a bayonet
charge, he slipped and fell sideways on the stone steps.
His shin bone smacked against the edge of the stone in
a way that was pretty well up to the old Viking standard
of such things. Blinks with the shock of the collision
fell also,--backwards on the top step, his head striking
first. He lay, to all appearance, as dead as the most
insignificant casualty in Servia.
I watched the waiters carrying them into the club, with
that new field ambulance attitude towards pain which is
getting so popular. They had evidently acquired precisely
the old pagan attitude that Blinks and Jinks desired.
And the evening after that I saw Blinks and Jinks, both
more or less bandaged, sitting in a corner of the club
beneath a rubber tree, making peace.
Jinks was moving out of Montenegro and Blinks was foregoing
all claims to Polish Prussia; Jinks was offering
Alsace-Lorraine to Blinks, and Blinks in a fit of chivalrous
enthusiasm was refusing to take it.
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