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and seeing Gillette play Secret Service. But this is part
of the mania. Jinks and Blinks had suddenly developed
the hallucination that they knew the history of all wars
by a sort of instinct.
They rose soon after that, dusted off their waistcoats
with their napkins and waddled heavily towards the door.
I could hear them as they went talking eagerly of the
need of keeping the troops in hard training. They were
almost brutal in their severity. As they passed out of
the door,one at a time to avoid crowding,they were
still talking about it. Jinks was saying that our whole
generation is overfed and soft. If he had his way he
would take every man in the United States up to forty
seven years of age (Jinks is fortyeight) and train him
to a shadow. Blinks went further. He said they should
be trained hard up to fifty. He is fiftyone.
After that I used to notice Jinks and Blinks always
together in the club, and always carrying on the European
War.
I never knew which side they were on. They seemed to be
on both. One day they commanded huge armies of Russians,
and there was one week when Blinks and Jinks at the head
of vast levies of Cossacks threatened to overrun the
whole of Western Europe. It was dreadful to watch them
burning churches and monasteries and to see Jinks throw
whole convents full of white robed nuns into the flames
like so much waste paper.
For a time I feared they would obliterate civilization
itself. Then suddenly Blinks decided that Jinks' Cossacks
were no good, not properly trained. He converted himself
on the spot into a Prussian Field Marshal, declared
himself organised to a pitch of organisation of which
Jinks could form no idea, and swept Jinks' army off the
earth, without using any men at all, by sheer organisation.
In this way they moved to and fro all winter over the
map of Europe, carrying death and destruction everywhere
and revelling in it.
But I think I liked best the wild excitement of their
naval battles.
Jinks generally fancied himself a submarine and Blinks
acted the part of a firstclass battleship. Jinks would
pop his periscope out of the water, take a look at Blinks
merely for the fraction of a second, and then, like a
flash, would dive under water again and start firing his
torpedoes. He explained that he carried six.
But he was never quick enough for Blinks. One glimpse
of his periscope miles and miles away was enough. Blinks
landed him a contact shell in the side, sunk him with
all hands, and then lined his yards with men and cheered.
I have known Blinks sink Jinks at two miles, six milesand
oncein the club billiard room just after the battle of
the Falkland Islands,he got him fair and square at

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