ng the night when it
could be got to burn without smoking.

My servant "acquired" packing-cases and arranged them as washstand
and dressing-table. He hung cords like clothes lines across the
corners of the hut and suspended my kit on them. He watched the
comings and goings of other officers and looted from vacant huts a
whole collection of useful articles--a lantern which held a candle, a
nest of pigeon-holes, three bookshelves, a chair without a back, a
tin mug for shaving water, and a galvanised iron pot which made an
excellent basin. He spent a whole morning making and fixing up
outside my door a wooden boot-scraper. I suppose he hoped in this way
to prevent my covering the floor of the hut with mud. But the effort
was wasted. The scraper lay down flat on its side whenever I touched
it with my foot. It remained a distinguishing ornament of my hut,
useful as a guide to any one who wanted to know where I lived, but no
good for any other purpose. In this way I gradually became possessed
of a kind of Robinson Crusoe outfit of household furniture.

I cannot say that I was ever comfortable in that hut. Yet the life
agreed with me. It is evidently a mistake to suppose that damp beds,
damp clothes, and shivering fits at night are injurious to health. It
is most unpleasant but it is not unwholesome to have to rise at 2
a.m. or 3 a.m. and run up and down in the rain to get warm enough to
go to sleep.

Yet I escaped without even a cold in my head. I should be most
ungrateful if I wished any real harm to the inventor of those huts.
But perhaps some day his health will give way and he will find
himself suffering from rheumatism, congestion of the lungs, or frost
bite. Then I hope he will try a winter in one of his own huts. He
will not like it, but he will be a healthy man again before
spring--if he is not dead.

CHAPTER V

KHAKI

War must always have been a miserable business; but our fathers and
grandfathers had the sense to give it an outward semblance of gaiety.
They went forth to battle dressed in the brightest colours they could
find. They put feathers in their hats. They sewed gold braid on their
coats. They hung sparkling metal about their persons. They had brass
bands to march in front of them. While engaged in the business of
killing their enemies they no doubt wallowed in mud, just as we do;
went hungry, sweated, shivered, were parched or soaked, grumbled and
cursed. But they made a gallant effort at p