n a larder, can taste very good indeed, even to the wearer of a
spick-and-span grey lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means
when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screened service-door
furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathise. I too have wolfed the choice
morsels from the banquet of my betters.

II

LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS

In May, 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently
the row of tin huts, to which I was introduced as my future address "for
the duration," wore an attractive 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 fresh and
green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden
earth--the barrack square--was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its
quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the
cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet
morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm beds;
or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves 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
accommodation which was offered him. Merely for amusement's sake he had
often "roughed it" in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but
well-built huts--which even proved, on investigation, to contain beds:
an unexpected luxury.

"I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty
bed. It's the hut at the end of the line."

Thereafter Hut 6 was my home--and I hope I may never have a less
pleasant one or less good company for room-mates. In these latter I was
perhaps peculiarly 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 both at that moment and in the long months which were to
elapse before various rearrangements began to scatter us, proved the
warmest of friends.

Twenty-one of us shared our downsittings and our uprisings in Hut 6.
There might have been an even number, twenty-two, but one bed's place
was monopolised by a stove (which in winter consumed coke, and in summer
was the repository of old newspapers and orange-peel). The hut,
accordingly, presented a vista of twenty-one beds