“C” are billeted in a village two miles away, and we see them but rarely.

The rain has ceased for a brief space—­it always does about parade time—­and we accordingly fall in.  The men are carrying picks and shovels, and make no attempt to look pleased at the circumstance.  They realise that they are in for a morning’s hard digging, and very likely for an evening’s field operations as well.  When we began, company training a few weeks ago, entrenching was rather popular.  More than half of us are miners or tillers of the soil, and the pick and shovel gave us a home-like sensation.  Here was a chance, too, of showing regular soldiers how a job should be properly accomplished.  So we dug with great enthusiasm.

But A Company have got over that now.  They have developed into sufficiently old soldiers to have acquired the correct military attitude towards manual labour.  Trench-digging is a “fatigue,” to be classed with, coal-carrying, floor-scrubbing, and other civilian pursuits.  The word “fatigue” is a shibboleth with, the British private.  Persuade him that a task is part of his duty as a soldier, and he will perform it with tolerable cheerfulness; but once allow him to regard that task as a “fatigue,” and he will shirk it whenever possible, and regard himself as a deeply injured individual when called upon to undertake it.  Our battalion has now reached a sufficient state of maturity to be constantly on the qui vive for cunningly disguised fatigues.  The other day, when kilts were issued for the first time, Private Tosh, gloomily surveying his newly unveiled extremities, was heard to remark with a sigh—­

“Anither fatigue!  Knees tae wash, noo!”

Presently Captain Blaikie arrives upon the scene; the senior subaltern reports all present, and we tramp off through the mud to our training area.

We are more or less in possession of our proper equipment now.  That is to say, our wearing apparel and the appurtenances thereof are no longer held in position with string.  The men have belts, pouches, and slings in which to carry their greatcoats.  The greatcoats were the last to materialise.  Since their arrival we have lost in decorative effect what we have gained in martial appearance.  For a month or two each man wore over his uniform during wet weather—­in other words, all day—­a garment which the Army Ordnance Department described as—­“Greatcoat, Civilian, one.”  An Old Testament writer would have termed it “a coat of many colours.”  A tailor would have said that it was a “superb vicuna raglan sack.”  You and I would have called it, quite simply, a reach-me-down.  Anyhow, the combined effect was unique.  As we plodded patiently along the road in our tarnished finery, with our eye-arresting checks and imitation velvet collars, caked with mud and wrinkled with rain, we looked like nothing so much on earth as a gang of weighers returning from an unsuccessful day at a suburban race-meeting.