Great War

The Great War is invoked as a biographical reference point in a comic portrait of Colonel Carter: although he speaks as if familiar with the Shanghai Club, Caroline and Dr. James Sheppard believe his eastern experience extended no farther than wartime India. The allusion gives their private judgment a concrete basis while preserving the village’s indulgence toward his military pretensions.

The War as a Biographical Boundary

The passage locates Colonel Carter’s military service in India during the Great War. There, according to Dr. James Sheppard’s account, Carter juggled tins of bully beef and plum and apple jam. The remembered detail is deliberately prosaic: rather than confirming the cosmopolitan experience implied by his Shanghai Club anecdote, it fixes his eastern travels within a specific wartime setting.

The Shanghai Club Claim

As the group prepares to play Mah Jong, Colonel Carter calls the handling of the tiles “washing the tiles” and associates the phrase with the Shanghai Club. Caroline and Dr. James Sheppard privately doubt that he ever visited the club, or travelled farther east than India. The contrast between the club’s implied social sophistication and the tins of army provisions in his wartime recollection makes the claim seem like one of the colonel’s adopted military mannerisms.

Village Tolerance and Narrative Effect

The Great War reference helps characterize both the colonel and the community around him. Colonel Carter is described as determinedly military, while King's Abbot permits people to indulge their little idiosyncrasies. Dr. James Sheppard’s aside thus turns the war into more than background: it supplies the limit against which the colonel’s self-presentation is gently measured, within a scene otherwise occupied by coffee, Mah Jong tiles, and the group’s silent competition to build its wall first.