Sitting on the borrowed bed-cot, the recruit was able to take a good look round. The ways of these men, their quickness in cleaning and polishing articles of equipment, were worth watching, he decided. They joked and chaffed each other, they sang scraps of songs, allegedly pathetic and allegedly humorous; they shouted from one end of the room to the other in order to carry on conversations; they called the Army names, they called each other names, and they called individuals who were evidently absent yet more names, none of them complimentary. They made a lot of noise, and in that noise one of them, having finished his cleaning, slept; when he snored, one of his comrades threw a boot at him, and, since the boot hit him, he woke up and looked round, but in vain. Therefore he calmly went to sleep again, but this time he did not snore. The recruit, who had come out of an ordinary civilian home, and hitherto had had only the vaguest of notions as to what the Army was really like, wondered if he were dreaming, and then realised that he himself was one of these men, since he had voluntarily given up certain years of his life to their business. With that reflection he undressed and got into bed. After “lights-out” had sounded and been promptly obeyed, he went to sleep.... His impressions are typical, and his introduction to the barrack-room may serve to record the view gained by the majority of those who enlist: that first glimpse of military life is something utterly strange and incomprehensible, and the recruit sleeps his first night in barracks--or stays awake--bewildered by the novelty of his surroundings, and a little afraid. In a few days the recruit begins to feel a little more at home in his new surroundings. One of his first ordeals is that of being fitted with clothing, and with few exceptions, all his clothing is ready-made, for the quartermaster’s store of a unit contains a variety of sizes and fittings of every article required, and from among these a man must be fitted out from head to foot. The regimental master-tailor attends at the clothes’ fitting, and makes notes of alterations required--shortening or lengthening sleeves, letting out here, and taking in there. When clothes and boots have been fitted, the recruit is issued a “small kit,” consisting of brushes and cleaning materials for himself and his clothes and equipment, even unto a toothbrush and a comb. As a rule, he omits the ceremony of locking these things away in his box when he returns to the barrack-room, with the result that most of them are missing when he looks on the shelf or in the box where he placed them. For, in a barrack-room, although all things are not common, the property of the recruit is fair game, and he catches who can.