Explore "An Awfully Big Adventure" by Bartimeus on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Milsom greeted me a couple of hours later in the big oak-panelled hall of the Officers' Mess at the Marine Headquarters. I had been on board the ship, had half an hour's yarn with the Skipper (who was full of the ways of Dockyard Officials and the tale of our Defect List), shifted, and got up to the Marines' Mess as the first dinner bugles were sounding.
Every time I enter that hall, with its tattered Colours hanging from the walls and the portraits of bygone Commandants staring down over their gorgets, I am struck afresh by the reminders, cherished here on all sides, of the proud past of the Corps. Greenwich Hospital excepted, the Navy has no shrines where the emblems of its traditions are preserved, but the Marine Headquarters always seem to echo with whispers of the Marines' history. In the seconds that it took me to cross the wide floor, I had a blurred vision of the Rock, taken by storm and held against odds; of haggard, fever-stricken detachments in rotting pith helmets, fighting their way through swamp and jungle, of the African sun catching the reddened bayonets of a desert square....