rst thing that another will throw into the
trail. A man's outfit is a matter which seems to touch his private
honor. I have heard veterans sitting around a camp-fire proclaim the
superiority of their kits with a jealousy, loyalty, and enthusiasm they
would not exhibit for the flesh of their flesh and the bone of their
bone. On a campaign, you may attack a man's courage, the flag he serves,
the newspaper for which he works, his intelligence, or his camp manners,
and he will ignore you; but if you criticise his patent water-bottle he
will fall upon you with both fists. So, in recommending any article for
an outfit, one needs to be careful. An outfit lends itself to dispute,
because the selection of its component parts is not an exact science. It
should be, but it is not. A doctor on his daily rounds can carry in a
compact little satchel almost everything he is liable to need; a
carpenter can stow away in one box all the tools of his trade. But an
outfit is not selected on any recognized principles. It seems to be a
question entirely of temperament. As the man said when his friends asked
him how he made his famous cocktail, "It depends on my mood." The truth
is that each man in selecting his outfit generally follows the lines of
least resistance. With one, the pleasure he derives from his morning
bath outweighs the fact that for the rest of the day he must carry a
rubber bathtub. Another man is hearty, tough, and inured to an
out-of-door life. He can sleep on a pile of coal or standing on his
head, and he naturally scorns to carry a bed. But another man, should he
sleep all night on the ground, the next day would be of no use to
himself, his regiment, or his newspaper. So he carries a folding cot and
the more fortunate one of tougher fibre laughs at him. Another man says
that the only way to campaign is to travel "light," and sets forth with
rain-coat and field-glass. He honestly thinks that he travels light
because his intelligence tells him it is the better way; but, as a matter
of fact, he does so because he is lazy. Throughout the entire campaign
he borrows from his friends, and with that _camaraderie_ and
unselfishness that never comes to the surface so strongly as when men are
thrown together in camp, they lend him whatever he needs. When the war
is over, he is the man who goes about saying: "Some of those fellows
carried enough stuff to fill a moving van. Now, look what I did. I made
the entire c