troubling to tie it up, I
shall just hand it to the C.P.M. and say, "Hang on to this, will you,
till I come back?" Mark my words: if I'm away for fifty years or so,
every penny of it will be there when I return. It isn't his habit to
part with other people's money entrusted to his keeping.

I have a sergeant, an honest upright man with no complications in his
past, except that he is a Scot by birth and, happening to be there at
the outbreak, enlisted in Canada. By reason of his uncertain movements
he is unable to draw his food in the usual way, and yet insists,
tiresomely, on being fed. So I said he'd better feed himself, and I
claimed an authority for him to draw ration money in lieu of rations.
Having weathered all the storms of an administrative correspondence, we
eventually came by the authority itself. This was a great and happy day
in the lives of myself and the forty-nine other officers who had by this
time become involved in the affair. "Sgt. Blank is authorised to draw
ration money in lieu of rations as from March 1st, 1916," I read to him,
and sighed with relief. But it was a premature sigh. The trouble was
only just beginning.

"One-and-eightpence a day, no less, you get, Sergeant," I said.

He was by now an old hand. "One-and-eightpence a day I am authorized to
get, Sir," he corrected me.

A man not easily depressed, he took a cheerful view of the preliminary
condition that he was paid monthly, in arrear. He proposed to spend his
meal-times, during the rationless and moneyless days of March, reading
the correspondence; quite enough to engage a man's whole attention
during at least that period.

April 1st, 1916, duly arrived, and with it the renewal of the Sergeant's
food question, "What, again?" I asked, irritably.

But the Field Cashier, who was first approached on April 3rd, wasn't in
the least irritated. The subject interested him from the start.
Moreover, argumentative by nature though he undoubtedly was, he was all
anxiety to pay. First, however, there were one or two trifling
formalities to be observed. "You see," he explained, "I can only pay out
upon an authority."

With some confidence and no little pride we opened our despatch-case and
produced our correspondence. He read every word of it; his pay corporal
did the same, and very kindly explained it to us all as he went along.
"This," they agreed, "is your authority to get the money. What I want is
an authority to pay it." With expressions