He looked at his hands in the concentrated light of the railway carriage. They were coarsened and chapped, ingrained with dirt impossible to remove with ice-cold water. He thought of the delicate hands of Fanny and Elizabeth’s slender fingers. On parade the officers never swore at the men, the N.C.O.’s rarely, whatever they might do off parade. It was an offence under King’s Regs. The Physical Training Instructors were, however, an exception. They sometimes displayed an uncouth humour in their objurgations. There were time-honoured pleasantries, such as “Yer may break yer muckin’ mother’s ’eart, but yer won’t break mine!” There was the Bayonet Instructor, a singularly rough diamond from Whitechapel, who in mimic bayonet fighting at the stuffed bags, loved to give the command: “At ’is stummick an’ goolies, Point!” This gentleman, offended at the awkward posture of a rather plump recruit doing the “double knee bend,” had apostrophized the unfortunate man: “’Ere, you, Frost. Can’t yer get down like a muckin’ soldier, and not like a bloody great pross what’s bein’ blocked?” Winterbourne smiled again to himself. The road to glory was undoubtedly devious in our fair island story. From Reveille at five-thirty until Lights Out they had been driven and harassed and bullied for weeks to the strain of: “Look to yer front there!” “’Old yer ’eads _up_, can’t yer, all them tanners was picked up on first p’rade.” “Smith, yer got them straps crossed wrong—if yer do it again, I’ll crime yer.” And over the voices of the various sergeant-instructors shouting to their squads, boomed the R.S.M.’s inevitable: “Stand still, there! Stand _Steady_.” Just like the South Foreland light-ship in a fog. The fatigue of continual over-exercise and of the physical and mental strain was severe to men fresh from sedentary lives, or stiff from the plough and the workshop. For the first weeks especially they were sore all over, and sank into heavy unrefreshing sleep at night. Winterbourne bore it better than most. His long walks and love for swimming had kept him supple. He could not raise weights like the draymen or dig like the navvies, but he could out-march and out-run them all, learn every new movement in half the time, dismount a Lewis gun while they were wondering which way the handle came off, score four bulls out of five, and saw immediately why you made head-cover first when digging in. But he too felt the fatigue. He remembered one perfectly awful day. They had been drilled and marched and drilled and inspected from dawn to evening of a baking autumn day; then at seven there had been three hours of night operations. At twelve, they were all awakened by a false Fire Alarm, and had to turn out in trousers and boots. Winterbourne had taken over his shoulder the arm of a man who was too exhausted to run unassisted on the parade grounds. The N.C.O.’s yelped them on like sheep dogs.