MILITARY SERVICE 291
He orders me to get up and stand before him "at attention/' and declares he will "have me up" for it.
When, however, he has sobered down, he turns kind again, and calls me to him; he likes me to tell him "stories" out of books.
Sometimes the orderly calls me into the orderly- room, and gives me a report to draw up, or else a list or a calculation to make. He himself writes badly, and is very poor at figures.
I do everything he wants, and he is very glad of my help, only it wouldn't do for him to confess to it, and when I have finished, he always says to me:
"If the commanding officer is not satisfied, he will send you to fetch water."
I know it isn't true, first, because the commanding officer mustn't know that I write in the orderly-room, a Jew can't be an army secretary; secondly, because he is certain to be satisfied: he once gave me a note to write himself, and was very pleased with it.
"If you were not a Jew," he said to me then, "I should make a corporal of you."
Still, my corporal always repeats his threat about the water, so that I may preserve a proper respect for him, although I not only respect him, I tremble before his size. When Jie comes back tipsy from town, and finds me in the orderly-room, he commands me to drag his muddy boots off his feet, and I obey him and drag off his boots.
Sometimes I don't care, and other times it hurts my feelings.
