Two hours march in full
marching order makes men hungry, and hungry men are ardent explorers.
The dry and wet canteens faced one another, and each was capable of
accommodating a hundred men. Never were canteens crowded so quickly,
never have hundreds of the hungry and drouthy clamoured so eagerly for
admission as on that day. But time worked marvels; at the end of an
hour we fell in again outside a vast amount of victuals, and the
sea-sickness of the previous night, and the strain of the morning's
march were things over which now we could be humorously reminiscent.
Sheepskin jackets, the winter uniform of the trenches, were served out
to us, and all were tried on. They smelt of something chemical and
unpleasant, but were very warm and quite polar in appearance.
"Wish my mother could see me now," Bill the Cockney remarked. "My, she
wouldn't think me 'alf a cove. It's a balmy. I discovered the (p. 021)
South Pole, I'm thinkin'."
"More like you're up the pole!" some one cut in, then continued, "If
they saw us at St. Albans[1] now! Bet yer they wouldn't say as we're
for home service."
[Footnote 1: It was at St. Albans that we underwent
most of our training.]
That night we slept in bell-tents, fourteen men in each, packed tight
as herrings in a barrel, our feet festooning the base of the central
pole, our heads against the lower rim of the canvas covering. Movement
was almost an impossibility; a leg drawn tight in a cramp disturbed
the whole fabric of slumbering humanity; the man who turned round came
in for a shower of maledictions.
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