The Baron put his hands on his hips.
“Blast it, what does he want?” he
muttered.
Colonel Lime of the Black Tigers was riding towards him. How the Baron
loathed the colonel! He’d plagued him from France to Russia and back again,
always asking awkward questions and spreading foul rumours. Why was the world
eternally choked with such oafs? Lime was physically intrusive, too, and loud
and impossibly fat with huge whiskers - made him look like a walrus stuffed
into a doll’s uniform. Worst of all, the Baron knew that Lime suffered from the
very worst of afflictions: a chronic sense of honesty
“The Austrian attack will soon be getting underway, sir!” shouted the Colonel.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Haste and rudeness are unseemly companions, sir – especially in the
gout-ridden.”
“Parzifal, General of our
army,” sneered Lime. “You who were supposed to be so big at the Imperial Court
in France.”
“I still am – it’s the Court that’s
smaller.”
(The Baron's verbal retort is a play on Gloria Swanson's memorable line in the 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard)
