ching, and men have to go for
days and even weeks unwashed, unshaven, and without even a chance of
getting out of their clothes for a single hour.

The officers suffer just as much as the men. After a fortnight or three
weeks at the front one cavalry officer wrote that he "had not taken his
clothes off since he left the Curragh." "For five days," another says,
"I never took off my boots, even to sleep, and for two days I did not
even wash my hands or face. For three days and nights I got just four
hours' sleep. The want of sleep was the one thing we felt." Sleep,
indeed, is just the last thing the officers get. Brigadier-General Sir
Philip Chetwode outlines his daily program as "work from 4 a.m. to 11
p.m., then writing and preparations until 4 a.m. again." To make matters
worse just at the start of the famous cavalry charge which brought Sir
Philip such distinction, his pack-horse bolted into the German lines
carrying all his luggage, and leaving him nothing but a toothbrush!

One of the Dorsets' officers reports that "owing to the continuous
fighting the 'evening meal' has become conspicuous by its absence," but
in spite of having carried a 1lb. tin of compressed beef and a few
biscuits about with them for several days they are all "most beastly fit
on it." "No one seems any the worse, and I feel all the fitter," writes
an officer of a Highland Regiment, "after long marches in the rain going
to bed as wet as a Scotch mist."

The men are just as cheerful as their officers. "You can't expect a
blooming Ritz Hotel in the firing line," is how a jocular Cockney puts
it. An artilleryman says they would fare sumptuously if it weren't for
the German shells at meal times: "one shell, for instance, shattered our
old porridge pot before we'd had a spoonful out of it!" Lieutenant
Jardine, a son of Sir John Jardine, M.P., relates this same incident.
Gunner Prince, R.F.A., has a little joke about the sleeping quarters:
"Just going to bed. Did I say bed? I mean under the gun with an overcoat
for a blanket." There is no sort of grumbling at all. As Lieutenant
Stringer, of the 5th Lancers, expresses it, the A.S.C. "manage things
very well, and our motto is 'always merry and bright.'"

Occasionally, when there is a lull in the operations, the men dine
gloriously. Stories are told of gargantuan feeds--of majestic stews that
can be scented even in the German lines. Occasionally, too, there is the
capture of a banquet prepared for the