No one spoke much. There were mutters and grumbles of complaint, but I think each one of us was too caught up in his own fears to say much of anything to his fellows. We mustered in the usual place, and Corporal Dent appeared to curse and blame us for his miserable life. I felt dull and discouraged and wondered briefly why I had ever wanted so desperately to be here. This was not the golden future I had imagined for myself. This was misery, pure and simple. I wondered if Spink had been right. Maybe it would just be a relief to be sent home, with all expectations of me vanished forever. I gave myself a shake, trying to dispel my gloominess. Dent gave me a demerit for moving in ranks. I scarcely noticed.
We waited in the cold and the dark until our cadet officers came by and reviewed us. Surprisingly, they found little to scorn us for that day. Perhaps they, too, dreaded the day’s exams, even though the upperclassmen were immune from the culling process. Or perhaps they looked forward to Dark Evening’s holiday and felt merciful to us. Maybe it was simply too dark for Jaffers to see that I had not brushed my jacket and that my trousers had spent the night on the floor, not on a hanger. In any case, Cadet Captain Jaffers allowed as how we would do, and we were dismissed from our inspection.
We marched off to a breakfast I had no stomach for. I forced myself to eat, reminding myself of Sergeant Duril’s saying, “The soldier who doesn’t break his fast when he can is a fool.” At the table, only Gord seemed to eat with a will. Spink pecked at his food. Trist heaped his plate, ate five bites, and then pushed at the rest as if he were poking a dead animal with a stick. Ordinarily Corporal Dent would have demanded that he eat whatever he took, and lectured us all that a man who took supplies greedily and then wasted them was a liability to his whole regiment. Dent, however, had found as many possible excuses as he could of late to leave us alone at table, so there was no one to rebuke us for the half-eaten meals that day.
We fell in and marched off through a cold day that was just now turning gray to our first class. In Military History, the entire chalkboard was already covered in questions written out in Captain Infal’s sloping hand. He greeted us with, “Come in, leave your books closed, and start writing. I will collect your papers at the end of class. No talking until then.”
And that was it. I set out my paper and began writing. I tried to pace myself, to be sure that I would write at least some sort of answer to each question, and did well enough at that. I left space at the ends of some answers to allow myself to add more detail if I had time. I struggled with dates and with the sequences of the sea battles. I wrote until my pen was slick in my fingers and my hand ached. And suddenly Captain Infal was announcing, “That’s it, Cadets. Finish the sentence you are writing and put your pens away. Leave your papers on your desk. I will take them up. Dismissed.”