As I read somewhere today about this story, he went AWOL to join his Unit at the Front. You can’t help but admire this guy and all the rest of them...
"‘Board or no Board, I ’adn’t the nerve to stay at ’ome—not with Mother chuckin’ ’erself round all three rooms like a rabbit every time the Gothas tried to get Victoria; an’ sister writin’ me aunts four pages about it next day. Not for me, thank you! till the war was over. So I slid out with a draft—they wasn’t particular in ’17, so long as the tally was correct—and I joined up again with our Circus somewhere at the back of Lar Pug Noy, I think it was.’"
One of Kipling's late short stories, notable for its sensitive treatment of PTSD (then known as "shell shock"), his use of the artifice of double stories-within-a-story, and his splendid command of dialect. And who else could tell a quite believable story about a former soldier in a Masonic Lodge, telling the narrator about his combat experiences in tandem with a Jane Austen appreciation society in a heavy artillery battery?