They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle
of the day, and then threw themselves down on their cots and
sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their
"towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words,
and the Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question
they had heard many times before.
There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance
Room with the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any
profession cannot read for eight hours a day in a temperature of 96
degrees or 98 degrees in the shade, running up sometimes to 103
degrees at midnight. Very few men, even though they get a
pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer and hide it under their cots, can
continue drinkmg for six hours a day. One man tried, but he died,
and nearly the whole regiment went to his funeral because it gave
them something to do. It was too early for the excitement of fever
or cholera. The men could only wait and wait and wait, and watch
the shadow of the barrack creeping across the blinding white dust.
That was a gay life.
They lounged about cantonments-it was too hot for any sort of
game, and almost too hot for vice-and fuddled themselves in the
evening, and filled themselves to distension with the healthy
nitrogenous food provided for them, and the more they stoked the
less exercise they took and more explosive they grew.
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