We pitched our tents at random, and were constantly obliged to beat the canvas in order to flatten out the threads and prevent the water from coming through. We were ten soldiers to every tent; each in turn took charge of the cooking: one went for meat, another for bread, another for wood, another for straw. I made wonderful soup; I received great compliments on it, especially when I mixed milk and cabbage with the stew, in the Breton way. I had learnt among the Iroquois not to mind smoke, so that I bore myself bravely before my fire of green and damp boughs. This soldier's life is very amusing; I imagined myself still among the Indians. As we sat at mess in our tent my comrades asked me for tales of my travels; they told me some fine stories in return; we all lied like a corporal in a tavern, with a conscript paying the reckoning. One thing tired me: washing my linen; it had to be done, and often, for the obliging robber had left me only one shirt, borrowed from my cousin Armand, besides the one on my back. When I lay soaping my stockings, my pocket-handkerchiefs and my shirt by the edge of a stream, with my head down and my loins up, I was seized with fits of giddiness; the motion of the arms gave me an unbearable pain in the chest. I was obliged to sit down among the horsetails and watercress; and, in the midst of the stir of war, I amused myself by watching the water flow peacefully past. Lope de Vega[85] makes a shepherdess wash the bandage of Love; that shepherdess would have been very useful to me for a little birch-cloth turban which my Floridans had given me.