V. C by David Christie Murray

If Polson had not to be taught how to ride, how to handle a sabre or a gun, or how to balance himself in the goose-step -- matters which he had taken the pains to master long ago -- there were still certain things to learn, and the button stick, and the flat and chain burnish, and the pots of chrome yellow, and blacking, and pipeclay, were just as strange to him as they would have been to any other raw recruit; so that he was teaching his business at one end and learning it at the other for a matter of some four or five days.

There was a poor exile of Erin in the shape of an impecunious Irish nobleman, who enlisted on the same day with Polson and whose uniform was tried on in the same hour.