D'you realise that
I can have you lashed
To a wheel and smashed?
What?
Rot!
Yes--SHOT!
D'you realise this?
Right--turn!
DISMISS!"

Lemnos: October 1915.


Born and bred in a studio, and brought up among the cloud-swept
mountains of Westmorland, amid the purple heather and the sunset in
the peat-moss puddles, barrack-life soon became like penal servitude.
I was like a caged wild animal. I knew now why the tigers and leopards
pace up and down, up and down, behind their bars at the Zoo.

We only stayed a week in the great, gray, prison-like barracks at
Tipperary. We looked about for the "sweetest girl" of the song--but
the "colleens" were disappointing. My heart was not "right there." We
moved to Limerick; and in Limerick we stopped for seven solid months.

For seven months we did the same old squad- drill every day, at the
same time, on the same old square, until at last we all began to be
unbearably "fed up." The sections became slack at drill because they
were over-drilled and sickened by the awful monotony of it all.

During those seven dreary months, in that dismal slum-grown town, we