The only man in my four who possessed a jack-knife to open the tin had cleaned his pipe with it, scraped the mud off his boots, cleaned out his nails and cut up plug tobacco. Handy things, jack-knives. He proceeded to hack open the tin and scoop out sardines. It was only my first morning and my stomach wasn’t strong in those days. I disappeared into the mist, alone with my dry bread and tea. Hunger has taught me much since then. The mist rolled up later and daylight showed us to be a pretty tough crowd. We were presently taken in hand by a lot of sergeants who divided us into groups, made lists of names and began to teach us how to march in the files, and in sections,--the elements of soldiering. Some of them didn’t seem to know their left foot from their right, but the patience of those sergeants was only equalled by the cunning of their blasphemy and the stolidity of their victims. After an hour of it we were given a rest for fifteen minutes, this time to get a handful of tobacco. Then it went on again and again,--and yet again. The whole of that first period of seven days was a long jumble of appalling happenings; meals served by scrofulitic hands on plates from which five other men’s leavings and grease had to be removed; bread cut in quarter loaves; meat fat, greasy, and stewed--always stewed, tea, stewed also, without appreciable milk, so strong that a spoon stood up in it unaided; sleeping in one’s clothes and inadequate washing in that atmosphere of filth indescribable; of parades to me childish in their elementariness; of long hours in the evening with nothing to do, no place to go, no man to talk to,--a period of absolute isolation in the middle of those thousands broken only by letters which assumed a paramount importance, constituting as they did one’s only link with all that one had left behind, that other life which now seemed like a mirage. Not that one regretted the step. It was a first-hand experience of life that only Jack London or Masefield could have depicted. It was too the means of getting out to fight the Boche. A monotonous means, yes, but every day one learnt some new drill and every day one was thrilled with the absolute cold-blooded reality of it all. It was good to be alive, to be a man, to get one’s teeth right into things. It was a bigger part to play than that of the boy in “The Blindness of Virtue.” 3 Two incidents stand out in that chrysalis stage of becoming soldiers. One was a sing-song, spontaneously started among the gun sheds in the middle of the white moonlight. One of the recruits was a man who had earned his living--hideously sarcastic phrase!--by playing a banjo and singing outside public houses. He brought his banjo into the army with him. I hope he’s playing still! He stuck his inverted hat on the ground, lit a candle beside it in the middle of the huge square, smacked his dry lips and drew the banjo out of its baize cover. “Perishin’ thirsty weather, Bill.”