, eleven along one wall
and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the sole
interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a
continuous shelf, bearing the hut-inhabitants' equipment, or at least
that portion of it--great-coat, water-bottle, mess-tin, etc.--not
continually in use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were
disposed with rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and
boots beneath the adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights.
These, 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--I do
not know why, for personally I have no objection to bare boards. I
suppose linoleum is easier to keep clean than wood; and that aisle,
tramped on incessantly by hobnail boots which in damp weather were, as
to their soles and heels, mere bulbous trophies of the alluvial deposits
of the neighbourhood, was sometimes far from speckless. But to me the
strip of linoleum made our hut look remotely like a real room in a real
house: it was a touch of the conventional which I never cared for, and I
only subscribed to it when I had voted against it and been overborne. An
extraordinary proposition, that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot
on the stove's lid in summer, was, I am glad to say, negatived. It would
have been the thin end of the wedge ... we might have arrived at
Japanese fans and photograph-frames on the walls.

Not that our Company Officer would have tolerated any nonsense of that
kind. Punctually at eight-thirty, after the second parade of the day, he
marched through each hut, inspecting it and calling the attention of the
Sergeant-Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness. On wet
mornin