I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense principles and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has been led to fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing profession.  Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from my “Sister” because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward’s beds must face towards the same point of the compass:  the pillows on the vista of beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case mouths are, all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward’s door.  Similarly the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly the same depth and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting series of pairs of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each bedstead.  These trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a ward, and are, I understand, not by any means the insignia of a military as distinct from a civilian hospital.  They may or may not contribute to the comfort of the patient, but they betoken the captaincy of one whose methodicalness will in other and less visible respects most emphatically benefit him.

Our hut life was something more than a mere folding-up of bedding on bedsteads and great-coats on shelves.  After midday dinner it was allowable to unroll the mattress, make the bed, and rest thereon—­which most of us by that time (having been on the run since 6 o’clock parade) were very ready to do.  There was half an hour to spare before 2 o’clock parade, and a precious half-hour it was.  Snores rose from some of the beds where students of the war had collapsed beneath the newspapers which they had meant to read.  Desultory conversation enlivened those corners where the denizens of the hut were energetic enough to polish their boots or sew on buttons.  The one or two men who happened to be “going out on pass”—­we were allowed one afternoon per week—­were putting on their puttees and brushing-up the metal buttons of their walking-out tunics (otherwise known as their Square Push Suits).  The buttons of their working tunics had of course been burnished before parade.  The correct employment of button-sticks and of the magic cleaner called Soldier’s Friend; the polishing of one’s out-of-use boots and their placing, on the floor, with tied laces, and with their toes in line with the bed’s legs; the substitution of lost braces’ buttons by “bulldogs”; the furbishing of one’s belt; the propping-up of the front of one’s cap with wads of paper in the interior of the crown; the devices whereby non-spiral puttees can be coaxed into a resemblance of spiral ones and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers which refuse to tuck unlumpily into one’s socks—­these, and a host of other matters, always kept a proportion of the hut-dwellers awake and busy and loquacious even in the somnolent post-prandial half-hour before 2 o’clock.