Some five years before, the Colonel Commanding […] had asked them why the three stars should he, a Colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments.
, Rudyard Kipling, “Only a Subaltern”, in Under the Deodars (A. H. Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library; no. 4), Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh: A[rthur] H[enry] Wheeler & Co.; London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], pages 83–84