Colonel Barrow arrives early and observes the battalion's officers dancing rowdily, including Major Sinclair. Barrow and Sinclair icily swap their military backgrounds. Sinclair joined the regiment as an enlisted bandsman in Glasgow and rose through the ranks, winning the Military Medal and Distinguished Service Order during the war. Barrow by contrast came to the regiment from Eton then Oxford University, both in England, and that his ancestors were colonels of the regiment before him – although Barrow served only a year with the regiment back in 1933 before being posted to "special duties", including lecturing at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He has been fifteen years away from the battalion. When Sinclair humorously recounts he was briefly in Barlinnie Prison for being drunk and disorderly (also in 1933), Barrow reticently mentions his experience as a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. Sinclair dismissively assumes Barrow received preferential treatment as an officer ("officers' privileges and amateur dramatics") but in fact Barrow is deeply psychologically scarred after being tortured by the Japanese, which he does not tell Sinclair who not-so-privately resents his replacement by a "stupid wee man".