from which we snatched furtive moments with our friends on the crowded quay.  For hours a stream of horses and mules poured up the gangways; for two other corps were to share the ship with us, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry and the Irish Hospital.  At two the last farewells had been said, and we narrowed our thoughts once more to all the minutiae of routine.  As it turned out, we missed that tide, and did not start till two in the next morning; but I was oblivious of such a detail, having been made one of the two “stablemen” of my sub-division, a post which was to last for a week, and kept me in constant attendance on the horses down below; so that I might just as well have been in a very stuffy stable on shore, for all I saw of the run down Channel.  My duty was to draw forage from the forward hold (a gloomy, giddy operation), be responsible with my mate for the watering of all the horses in my sub-division—­thirty in number, for preparing their feeds and “haying up” three times a day, and for keeping our section of the stable-deck swept and clean.  We started with very fine weather, and soon fell into our new life, with, for me at least, a strange absence of any sense of transition.  The sea-life joined naturally on to the barrack-life.  Both are a constant round of engrossing duties, in which one has no time to feel new departures.  The transition had come earlier, with the first day in barracks, and, indeed, was as great and sudden a change, mentally and physically, as one could possibly conceive.  On the material side it was sharp enough; but the mental change was stranger still.  There was no perspective left; no planning of the future, no questioning of the present; none of that free play of mind and will with which we order our lives at home; instead, utter abandonment to superior wills, one’s only concern the present point of time and the moment’s duty, whatever it might be.

This is how we spent the day.

The trumpet blew reveille at six, and called us to early “stables,” when the horses were fed and watered, and forage drawn.  Breakfast was at seven:  the food rough, but generally good.  We were split up into messes of about fourteen, each of which elected two “mess orderlies,” who drew the rations, washed up, swept the troop-deck, and were excused all other duties.  I, and my friend Gunner Basil Williams, a colleague in my office at home, were together in the same mess.  Coffee, bread and butter, and something of a dubious, hashy nature, were generally the fare at breakfast.  I, as stableman, was constantly with the horses, but for the rest the next event was morning stables, about nine o’clock, which was a long and tedious business.  The horses would be taken out of their stalls, and half of us would lead them round the stable-deck for exercise, while the rest took out the partitions and cleaned the stalls.  Then ensued exciting scenes in getting them back again, an operation that most would not agree to without violent compulsion—­and