CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

Impressions of the voyage—­Sentry-go—­Troopship—­Limitations—­ Retrospect—­St. Vincent—­Forecasts—­The Start—­The Needles—­ Southampton Water—­Landing—­Paddington—­A dream.

I am not going to describe the voyage in detail.  Africa, with all it meant, was behind us, England was before, and the intervening time, monotonous though it was, passed quickly with that absorbing thought.  My chief impression is that of living in an eternal jostle; forming interminable queues outside canteens, washing-places, and stuffy hammock-rooms in narrow alleys, and of leisure hours spent on deck among a human carpet of khaki, playing euchre, or reading the advertisement columns of ancient halfpenny papers.  There was physical exercise, and a parade every day, but the chief duty was that of sentry-go, which recurred to each of us every five days, and lasted for twenty-four hours.  The ship teemed with sentries.  To look out for fire was our principal function, and a very important one it was, but I have also vivid recollections of lonely vigils over water-tight doors in stifling little alley-ways, of directing streams of traffic up troop-deck ladders, and of drowsy sinecures, in the midnight hours, over deserted water-taps and empty wash-houses.  These latter, which contained fourteen basins between fourteen hundred men, are a good illustration of the struggle for life in those days.  That a sentry should guard them at night was not unreasonable on the face of it, since I calculated that if every man was to appear washed at the ten o’clock parade, the first would have had to begin washing about six o’clock the night before, allowing ten minutes for a toilet, but unfortunately for this theory, the basins were always locked up at night.  Another grim pleasantry was an order that all should appear shaved at the morning parade.  Luckily this cynical regulation was leniently interpreted, for the spectacle of fourteen hundred razors flashing together in those narrow limits of time and space was a prospect no humane person could view with anything but horror.

There was plenty of time to reflect over our experiences in the last nine months.  Summing mine up, I found, and thinking over it at home find still, little but good in the retrospect.  Physically and mentally, I, like many others, have found this short excursion into strict military life of enormous value.  To those who have been lucky enough to escape sickness, the combination of open air and hard work will act as a lasting tonic against the less healthy conditions of town-life.  It is something, bred up as we have been in a complex civilization, to have reduced living to its simplest terms and to have realized how little one really wants.  It is much to have learnt the discipline, self-restraint, endurance and patience which soldiering demands. (For a driver, it is a liberal education in itself to have lived