However, I swore, received two shillings and three-pence for my first two days’ pay and was ordered to report at the Cavalry Depot, Woolwich, the following day, September 3, 1914. The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that didn’t allow me to think. But when I stepped out into the crowded streets with that two shillings rattling in my pocket I felt a very sober man. I knew nothing whatever of soldiering. I hardly even knew a corporal from a private or a rifle from a ramrod, and here I was Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th Lancers, with the sullen rumble of heavy guns just across the Channel--growing louder. 2 Woolwich! Bad smells, bad beer, bad women, bad language!--Those early days! None of us who went through the ranks will ever forget the tragedy, the humour, the real democracy of that period. The hand of time has already coloured it with the glow of romance, but in the living it was crude and raw, like waking up to find your nightmare real. Oxford University doesn’t give one much of an idea of how to cope with the class of humanity at that Depot in spite of Ruskin Hall, the working-man’s college, of which my knowledge consisted only of climbing over their wall and endeavouring to break up their happy home. But the Ruskin Hall man was a prince by the side of those recruits. They came with their shirts sticking out of trousers seats, naked toes showing out of gaping boots, and their smell---- We lay at night side by side on adjoining bunks, fifty of us in a room. They had spent their two days’ pay on beer, bad beer. The weather was hot. Most of them were stark naked. I’d had a bath that morning. They hadn’t. The room was enormous. The windows had no blinds. The moon streamed in on their distorted bodies in all the twistings of uneasy sleep. Some of them smoked cigarettes and talked. Others blasphemed them for talking, but the bulk snored and ground their teeth in their sleep. A bugle rang out. Aching in every limb from the unaccustomed hardness of the iron bed it was no hardship to answer the call. There were lavatories outside each room and amid much sleepy blasphemy we shaved, those of us who had razors, and washed, and in the chill of dawn went down to a misty common. It was too early for discipline. There weren’t enough N.C.O.’s, so for the first few days we hung about waiting for breakfast instead of doing physical jerks. Breakfast! One thinks of a warm room with cereals and coffee and eggs and bacon with a morning paper and, if there’s a soot in our cup, a sarcastic reference as to cleanliness. That was before the war. We lined up before the door of a gun shed, hundreds of us, shivering, filing slowly in one by one and having a chunk of bread, a mug of tea and a tin of sardines slammed into our hands, the sardines having to be divided among four.