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.