Explore "A Man Could Stand Up" by Ford Madox Ford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
An army -- especially in peace time! -- is a very complex and nicely adjusted affair, and though active operations against an enemy force are apt to blunt nicenesses and upset compensations -- as they might for a chronometer! -- and although this of ours, according to its own computation was only a ragtime aggregation, certain customs of times when this force was also Regular had an enormous power of survival.
It may seem a comic affair that a Colonel commanding a regiment in the midst of the most breathless period of hostilities, should refuse to take a pill. But the refusal, precisely like a grain of sand in the works of a chronometer, may cause the most singular perturbations. It was so in this case.