How one missed one’s household goods! One learnt to live like a snail, with everything in the world upon one’s person,--everything in the world cut down to the barest necessities, pipe and baccy, letters, a photograph, knife, fork and spoon, toothbrush, bit of soap, tooth paste, one towel, one extra pair of socks. Have you ever tried it for six months--a year? Then don’t. You miss your books and pictures, the bowl of flowers on the table, the tablecloth. All the things of everyday life that are taken for granted become a matter of poignant loss when you’ve got to do without them. But it’s marvellous what can be done without when it’s a matter of necessity. Bucks unfortunately didn’t get to the same room with me. All of us who had come in the night before were paraded at nine o’clock next morning before the Colonel and those who had seen service or who could ride were considered sheep and separated from the goats who had never seen service nor a horse. Bucks was a goat. I could ride,--although the sergeant-major took fifteen sulphuric minutes to tell me he didn’t think so. And so Bucks and I were separated by the space of a barrack wall, as we thought then. It was a greater separation really, for he was still learning to ride when I went out to France to reinforce the fighting regiment which had covered itself with glory in the retreat from Mons. But before that day came we worked through to the soul of Tidworth, and of the sergeant-major, if by any stretch of the imagination he may be said to have had a soul. I think he had, but all the other men in the squadron dedicated their first bullet to him if they saw him in France. What a man! He stands out among all my memories of those marvellous days of training when everything was different from anything I had ever done before. He stands before me now, a long, thin figure in khaki, with a face that had been kicked in by a horse, an eye that burnt like a branding iron, and picked out unpolished buttons like a magnet. In the saddle he was a centaur, part of the horse, wonderful. His long, thin thighs gripped like tentacles of steel. He could make an animal grunt, he gripped so hard. And his language! Never in my life had I conceived the possibilities of blasphemy to shrivel a man’s soul until I heard that sergeant-major. He ripped the Bible from cover to cover. He defied thunderbolts from on high and referred to the Almighty as though he were a scullion,--and he’s still doing it. Compared to the wholesale murder of eight million men it was undoubtedly a pin-prick, but it taught us how to ride! 6 Reveille was at 5.30. Grunts, groans, curses, a kick,--and you were sleepily struggling with your riding breeches and puttees. The morning bath? Left behind with all the other things.