You ought to see us change guard.  A similar ceremony takes place, we believe, outside Buckingham Palace every morning, and draws a considerable crowd; but you simply cannot compare it with ours.  How often does the guard at Buckingham Palace fix bayonets?  Once! and the thing is over.  It is hardly worth while turning out to see. We sometimes do it as much as seven or eight times before we get it right, and even then we only stop because the sergeant-in-charge is threatened with clergyman’s sore throat.  The morning Private Mucklewame fixed his bayonet for the first time, two small boys stayed away from school all day in order to see him unfix it when he came off guard in the afternoon.  Has any one ever done that at Buckingham Palace?

However, as I say, they have got used to us now.  We fall in for our diurnal labours in comparative solitude, usually in heavy rain and without pomp.  We are fairly into the collar by this time.  We have been worked desperately hard for more than four months; we are grunting doggedly away at our job, not because we like it, but because we know it is the only thing to do.  To march, to dig, to extend, to close; to practise advance-guards and rear-guards, and pickets, in fair weather or foul, often with empty stomachs—­that is our daily and sometimes our nightly programme.  We are growing more and more efficient, and our powers of endurance are increasing.  But, as already stated, we no longer go about our task like singing birds.

It is a quarter to nine in the morning.  All down the street doors are opening, and men appear, tugging at their equipment. (Yes, we are partially equipped now.) Most of B Company live in this street.  They are fortunate, for only two or three are billeted in each little house, where they are quite domestic pets by this time.  Their billeting includes “subsistence,” which means that they are catered for by an experienced female instead of a male cooking-class still in the elementary stages of its art.

“A” are not so fortunate.  They are living in barns or hay-lofts, sleeping on the floor, eating on the floor, existing on the floor generally.  Their food is cooked (by the earnest band of students aforementioned) in open-air camp-kitchens; and in this weather it is sometimes difficult to keep the fires alight, and not always possible to kindle them.

“D” are a shade better off.  They occupy a large empty mansion at the end of the street.  It does not contain a stick of furniture; but there are fireplaces (with Adam mantelpieces), and the one thing of which the War Office never seems to stint us is coal.  So “D” are warm, anyhow.  Thirty men live in the drawing-room.  Its late tenant would probably be impressed with its new scheme of upholstery.  On the floor, straw palliasses and gravy.  On the walls, “cigarette photties”—­by the way, the children down here call them “fag picters.”  Across the room run clothes-lines, bearing steaming garments (and tell it not in Gath!) an occasional hare skin.