ad a fight here yesterday--sheer boredom.
Ortheris has a swollen lip, and another private has a bad black eye.
There is to be a return match. I perceive the chief horror of warfare is
boredom....

"Our feeding here is typical of the whole system. It is a system
invented not with any idea of getting the best results--that does not
enter into the War Office philosophy--but to have a rule for everything,
and avoid arguments. There is rather too generous an allowance of bread
and stuff per man, and there is a very fierce but not very efficient
system of weighing and checking. A rather too generous allowance is, of
course, a direct incentive to waste or stealing--as any one but our
silly old duffer of a War Office would know. The checking is for
quantity, which any fool can understand, rather than for quality. The
test for the quality of army meat is the smell. If it doesn't smell bad,
it is good....

"Then the raw material is handed over to a cook. He is a common soldier
who has been made into a cook by a simple ceremony. He is told, 'You are
a cook.' He does his best to be. Usually he roasts or bakes to begin
with, guessing when the joint is done, afterwards he hacks up what is
left of his joints and makes a stew for next day. A stew is hacked meat
boiled up in a big pot. It has much fat floating on the top. After you
have eaten your fill you want to sit about quiet. The men are fed
usually in a large tent or barn. We have a barn. It is not a clean barn,
and just to make it more like a picnic there are insufficient plates,
knives and forks. (I tell you, no army people can count beyond eight or
ten.) The corporals after their morning's work have to carve. When they
have done carving they tell me they feel they have had enough dinner.
They sit about looking pale, and wander off afterwards to the village
pub. (I shall probably become a corporal soon.) In these islands before
the war began there was a surplus of women over men of about a million.
(See the publications of the Fabian Society, now so popular among the
young.) None of these women have been trusted by the government with the
difficult task of cooking and giving out food to our soldiers. No man of
the ordinary soldier class ever cooks anything until he is a soldier....
All food left over after the stew or otherwise rendered uneatable by the
cook is thrown away. We throw away pail-loads. _We bury meat_....

"Also we get three pairs of socks. We work pretty hard. We