ed straw below. We were
packed in like sardines. Men were retching and groaning, cussing and
growling. At last I found a coil of rope. It was a huge coil with a hole
in the centre--something like a large bird's nest. I got into this hole
and curled up like a dormouse. Here I did not feel the cold so much,
and lying down I didn't feel sick. The moon glittered on the great gray
billows. The cattle-boat heaved up and slid down the mountains. She
pitched and rolled and slithered sideways down the wave-slopes. And so
to Waterford.

From Waterford by train to Tipperary. It was early morning. The first
thing I noticed was that the grass in Ireland was very green and that
the fields were very small.

We had had no food for twenty-seven hours. I found a very hard crust of
bread in my haversack, and eat it while the others were asleep in the
carriage.

CHAPTER III. SNARED

"CRIMED"

"Off with his head," said the Queen.--Alice in Wonderland.

"Charge against 31963--
Failing to drink some oniony tea;
Ha! Ha!
What! What!
I can have you SHOT!
D'you realise that
I can have you lashed
To a wheel and smashed?
What?
Rot!
Yes--SHOT!
D'you realise this?
Right--turn!
DISMISS!"

Lemnos: October 1915.

Born and bred in a studio, and brought up among the cloud-swept
mountains of Westmorland, amid the purple heather and the sunset in the
peat-moss puddles, barrack-life soon became like penal servitude. I was
like a caged wild animal. I knew now why the tigers and leopards pace up
and down, up and down, behind their bars at the Zoo.

We only stayed a week in the great, gray, prison-like barracks at
Tipperary. We looked about for the "sweetest girl" of the song--but the
"colleens" were disappointing. My heart was not "right there." We moved
to Limerick; and in Limerick we stopped for seven solid months.

For seven months we did the same old squad-drill every day, at the
same time, on the same old square, until at last we all began to be
unbearably "fed up." The sections became slack at drill because they
were over-drilled and sicke