A regimental canteen on Imbros does much to compensate. Unit representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels almost in the land of the living when, within fifteen miles, lie tinned fruit, butter, coffee, cocoa, tinned sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes, "Craven" mixture and chocolate. Such a _répertoire_, combined with a monthly visit from the Paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat hardships of the Crimea. The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime here. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the _minutiæ_ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. I have heard a Colonel-Chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from the charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. One never realised, until this period of enforced deprivation, the whole meaning of the classical fable of the Belly and the Members. Yet in the last analysis (all this talk is largely so much artistry) one is amazingly free from the hankering after creature-comforts. There is a sort of rough philosophy abroad to scorn delights and live laborious days. Those delights embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at nights are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. (The Arcadia mixture is unvarying, but cannot always be had.) This ought not to be. Once in six months a friend in Australia despatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise--fleeting indeed when one's comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, with reasonably good tobacco, gives the _entrée_ to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool. One harks back to the words of Lytton: "He who does not smoke tobacco either has never known any great sorrow or has rejected the sweetest consolation under heaven." Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little needs be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. It makes night hideous. One needs but think of the ravages open to one boarding-house imp amongst the sheets, to form some crude notion of what havoc may be wrought at night by a vermin whose name is legion. Keating's powder is _not_ "sold by all chemists and storekeepers" on the Peninsula. One would give a week's pay for an effective dose of insectibane.