shave every day. You must keep your buttons, accoutrements, and rifle
speckless, and have your hair cut in a style which is not becoming to
your particular type of beauty. Even your feet are not your own. Every
Sunday morning a young officer, whose leave has been specially stopped
for the purpose, comes round the barrack-rooms after church and
inspects your extremities, revelling in blackened nails and gloating
over hammer-toes. For all practical purposes, decides Private
Mucklewame, you might as well be in Siberia.

Still, one can get used to anything. Our lot is mitigated, too, by the
knowledge that we are all in the same boat. The most olympian N.C.O.
stands like a ramrod when addressing an officer, while lieutenants
make obeisance to a company commander as humbly as any private. Even
the Colonel was seen one day to salute an old gentleman who rode on to
the parade-ground during morning drill, wearing a red band round his
hat. Noting this, we realise that the Army is not, after all, as we
first suspected, divided into two classes--oppressors and oppressed.
We all have to "go through it."

Presently fresh air, hard training, and clean living begin to
weave their spell. Incredulous at first, we find ourselves slowly
recognising the fact that it is possible to treat an officer
deferentially, or carry out an order smartly, without losing one's
self-respect as a man and a Trades Unionist. The insidious habit of
cleanliness, once acquired, takes despotic possession of its victims:
we find ourselves looking askance at room-mates who have not yet
yielded to such predilections. The swimming-bath, where once we
flapped unwillingly and ingloriously at the shallow end, becomes quite
a desirable resort, and we look forward to our weekly visit with
something approaching eagerness. We begin, too, to take our profession