You see, it is not as easy as it sounds to take a thousand men and encamp them in a proper manner. Gradually the chaos is subdued, and as tents and half-built huts come they are quickly placed in their proper positions. While it is all in progress one is likely to stumble over the Colonel who has stolen half an hour from his busy work to sit on the ground and eat some bully beef, biscuits and chocolate, and who insists on everyone else doing the same; or to bump into the corpulent form of the R.S.M.--regimental sergeant major--who is everywhere, directing everything, in the way that only a R.S.M. can do, though his crossest word is usually grumbled through a smiling ruddy face, for his heart is proportionate to his large size. The day advances, night is coming on, and the tents have arrived only in sufficient numbers to cover one-third of the officers and men. Fortunately the sun still shines, though the March air is getting colder. A sleep in the open air promises to require extra blankets which do not exist in the camp. However, everyone smiles, and there is at least a gradually, though slowly, increasing amount of cover for the men of the battalion. Some of the men, wiser perhaps through previous like predicaments, are choosing the sheltered side of a small hill, and are digging shelters for themselves over which they are putting coverings of boughs. As it turns out they are wise, for in the end only sufficient coverings come for two-thirds of the battalion, and consequently, a few officers and quite a few men sleep in the open with only a blanket and their overcoats for covering. And Nature, the deceitful jade, who had smiled kindly upon us all day and promised us a dry, though cold, night, about midnight and for two days succeeding poured torrents of rain down upon us. The sick parade grew larger and the ground became lakes of mud. The cook-houses--so-called--which were only fires built in hollows, had their fires so drowned that we all ate primitive diet as well as lived most closely to nature. Everyone, as usual, had his consolation in laughing at the discomforts of the others, till order came out of chaos in the days that followed. CHAPTER IX DUGOUTS To anyone who has served any time at the front the above word will bring back recollections of various kinds, for dugouts are of varying types. The term is employed to denote any shelter in the neighborhood of the firing line, from the funk hole which is only a recess cut into the side of a trench with little or no shelter above it and none at the entrance, to the cavity dug down into the ground a distance varying from ten feet to seventy, and strengthened by supports of wood, steel, or concrete. It is also loosely used to denote cellars, caves, and shellholes which may be employed as means of protection from rifle bullet, shrapnel, or high explosive shell.