Often when that first whistle went, it found a good many of us still “complete in flea-bag,” and that scramble to get into things and appear “fully dressed” was an art in itself.  An overcoat, muffler, and a pair of field boots went a long way to complete this illusion.  Once however, Boss, to everyone’s pained surprise, said, “Will the troopers kindly take off their overcoats!” With great reluctance this was done amid shouts of laughter as three of us stood divested of coats in gaudy pyjamas.

Fatigue consisted of two things:  One—­“Tidying up the Camp,” which was a comprehensive term and meant folding up everyone’s bonnet covers and putting them in neat piles near the mess hut, collecting cotton waste and grease tins, etc., and weeding the garden (a rotten job).  The second was called “Doing the stoke-hole,” i.e. cleaning out the ashes from the huge boiler that heated the bath water, chopping sticks, laying the fire, and brushing the “hole” up generally.

Opinions were divided as to the merits of those two jobs.  Neither was popular of course, but we could choose.  The latter certainly had its points, because once done it was done for the day, while the former might be tidy at nine, and yet by 10 o’clock lumps of cotton waste might be blowing all over the place, tins and bonnet covers once more in untidy heaps.  I often “did the boiler,” but I simply hated chopping the sticks.  One day the axe was firmly fixed in a piece of hard wood and I was vainly hitting it against the block, with eyes tight shut, when I heard a chuckle from the top of the steps.  I looked up and there was a Tommy looking down into the hole, watching the proceedings.  Where he’d come from I don’t know.  “Call those ’ands?” he asked. “’Ere, give it to me”—­indicating the axe.  “I guess y’aint chopped many sticks, ’ave yer?” “No,” I said; “and I’m terrified of the thing!” I sat on the steps and watched him deftly slicing the wood into thin slips.  “This is a fatigue,” I said, by way of an explanation.  That tickled him!  He stopped and chuckled, “You do fatigues just the same as we do?” he asked.  “I never heard anything to beat that.  Well I never, wot’s the crime, I wonder?  Look ’ere,” he added, “I’ll chop you enough to last fatigues for a month, and you put ’em somewhere in the meantime,” and in ten minutes, mark you, there was a pile that rejoiced my heart.  He was a “Bird,” that man, and no mistake.

After brekker was over the first thing that had to be done before anything else was to get one’s ’bus running and in order for the day.  Once that was done we could do our huts, provided no jobs had come in; and when that was done the engine had to be thoroughly cleaned, and then the car.  I might add that this is an ideal account of the proceedings for, as often as not, we went out the minute the cars were started.  Three days elapsed sometimes before the hut could have a “turn out.”  On these occasions one just rolled into one’s bed at night unmade and unturned, too tired to care one way or the other.