Married “on the strength” in the Army carries with it a number of advantages for the married man. It is a little galling, in the first place, to have to satisfy one’s commanding officer as to the respectability of the intended wife before marriage, but it is not so many years ago that there was good reason for this. Once married, the soldier is granted free quarters for himself and wife, and the wife is allowed fuel and light up to a certain amount, together with rations, and an additional allowance is made in the event of children being born. Curiously enough, however, the size of the quarters allotted to the married men and their families is not determined by the number of children in the family, but by the rank of the married man; not many private soldiers venture to marry, for their rate of pay is so low as to make the experiment an extremely risky one, although the wife of the soldier gets--if she wishes it--a certain amount of the single men’s washing to do, by way of supplementing her husband’s pay. Married “off the strength”--that is, without the permission of the officer commanding the unit--is doubly risky, for the wife of the man who marries thus gets no official recognition; her husband has to occupy a place in the barrack-room, for no separate quarters can be allotted to him; he has at the same time to find lodgings somewhere among the civilian inhabitants of the station for his wife--and children, if there are any--and, if he is a good character, he may be granted a sleeping-out pass, which confers on him the privilege of sleeping out of barracks--and this is a privilege that he must beg, not a right that he can claim. As the married establishment of a regiment or battalion is necessarily small, men frequently get married “off the strength,” though how they manage to exist and at the same time provide for their wives on military pay is a mystery. The most common explanation is that the wife, whatever work she has been engaged in before her marriage, continues it after; the hardest part of the business is that neither wife nor husband, in these circumstances, can count on the possession of a home as those married “on the strength” understand it.