"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of
the many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There was,
I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The
great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the
eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a
pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three
polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the
right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not
loll--it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the
great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid
will reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons
won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth
will topple off its perch on the narrow shelf--which was designed to
refuse all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsound ideas
on the subject of compact storage.

The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated
concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress,
three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn
up his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out
on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold sheets.
But the moment the Réveillé uplifted you from your couch, that couch had
to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"! The
mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed at
the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with the
ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of _that_ you put the other
two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first
blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it