But in these days we were never less than four hours from the moment when Bill cried “Time to get up” to the time when we got into our harness.  It took two men to get one man into his harness, and was all they could do, for the canvas was frozen and our clothes were frozen until sometimes not even two men could bend them into the required shape.

The trouble is sweat and breath.  I never knew before how much of the body’s waste comes out through the pores of the skin.  On the most bitter days, when we had to camp before we had done a four-hour march in order to nurse back our frozen feet, it seemed that we must be sweating.  And all this sweat, instead of passing away through the porous wool of our clothing and gradually drying off us, froze and accumulated.  It passed just away from our flesh and then became ice:  we shook plenty of snow and ice down from inside our trousers every time we changed our foot-gear, and we could have shaken it from our vests and from between our vests and shirts, but of course we could not strip to this extent.  But when we got into our sleeping-bags, if we were fortunate, we became warm enough during the night to thaw this ice:  part remained in our clothes, part passed into the skins of our sleeping-bags, and soon both were sheets of armour-plate.

As for our breath—­in the daytime it did nothing worse than cover the lower parts of our faces with ice and solder our balaclavas tightly to our heads.  It was no good trying to get your balaclava off until you had had the primus going quite a long time, and then you could throw your breath about if you wished.  The trouble really began in your sleeping-bag, for it was far too cold to keep a hole open through which to breathe.  So all night long our breath froze into the skins, and our respiration became quicker and quicker as the air in our bags got fouler and fouler:  it was never possible to make a match strike or burn inside our bags!

Of course we were not iced up all at once:  it took several days of this kind of thing before we really got into big difficulties on this score.  It was not until I got out of the tent one morning fully ready to pack the sledge that I realized the possibilities ahead.  We had had our breakfast, struggled into our foot-gear, and squared up inside the tent, which was comparatively warm.  Once outside, I raised my head to look round and found I could not move it back.  My clothing had frozen hard as I stood—­perhaps fifteen seconds.  For four hours I had to pull with my head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a pulling position before being frozen in.