ve appearance. The sun shone upon their metallic sides and roofs. The shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a fine field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fr

es wept torrents in the twilight, and one's feet (despite the excellence of army boots) were chilled by their wadings through slush. Meanwhile, however, the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of the housing acco

geant-Major. "There's one empty bed.

eculiarly fortunate. But that is by the way. It suffices that twenty men, not one of whom I had ever seen before, welcomed a total stranger, and

, with the stove, beds, shelves, boxes and boots, constituted the entire furniture of the hut-unless you count an alarm-clock, bought by public subscription, and notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as though wanting to strike but failing, in the watches of the night, hours before its appointed minute had arrived. The hut contained no other furniture whatever, and in those days did not seem to us to require any. In the autumn, when the daylight shortened and we could no longer hold our parliaments on a bench outside, a couple of deck-chairs were mysteriously imported; and, as the authorities remained unshocked, a small table also appeared and was squeezed into a gap beside the stove. Some sybarite even goaded us into getting up a fund for a strip of linoleum to be laid in the aisle between the beds. This was done

ornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot, and thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down the aisle, were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots or belts, or whe

f the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not loll-it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the great-coat, from

according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of that you put the other two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval e

a ward's beds must face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on the vista of beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are, all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's door. Similarly the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs of triangles all ending at

ens of the hut were energetic enough to polish their boots or sew on buttons. The one or two men who happened to be "going out on pass"-we were allowed one afternoon per week-were putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal buttons of their walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits). The buttons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before parade. The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner called Soldier's Friend; the polishing of one's out-of-use boots and their placing, on the floor, with tied laces, and wi

ire that they could be instantly retrieved in the morning. Once between the blankets, conversation at first waxed rather than waned. The Night Wardmaster, whose duty it was to make the round of the orderlies' huts, disapproved of conversation after Lights-Out, and was apt to say so, loudly and menacingly, when he surprised us by popping his head in at the door. But-well-the Night Wardmaster always departed in the long run.... And then uprose, between bed and bed, those unconclusive debates in which the masculine soul delighteth: Theology; Woman; Victuals; Politics; Art; the Press; Sport; Marria

ver by any chance dreamt of rising until five to six. These gentry had reduced the ritual of dressing, and of rolling up their bedding, to a speed at which it might almost be compared to expert juggling: the quickness of the hand deceived the eye. At five minutes to six you would see the juggler asleep on his pillow, in blissful innocence; at six he would be on parade, as correctly attired as you were yourself, and having left behind him, in the hut, a bed as neatly folded as yours. The world is sprinkled with people who can do this kind of thing-and our hut was blessed with its due leaven of them. But I would not as

the May morning when I first beheld that corrugated-iron abode I thought it looked inviting enough; but I did not guess how fond I was to grow of its barn-like interior and of the sportive crew who shared its mathematically-allotted floor-space. "Next war," one optimist suggested during a typical Lights-Out séance, "let's all enlist together again." Th