ourless
foulness, senseless humourless blasphemy, and all that unnecessary,
avoidable ugliness that so richly augmented the unavoidable....

Memories ...!

Sitting throughout compulsory church, cursing and mutinous of heart,
because after spending several hours of the Day of Rest in burnishing
and pipe-claying, blacking and shining ("Sunday spit an' polish"), he
was under orders for sharp punishment--because at the last moment his
tunic had been fouled by a passing pigeon! When would the Authorities
realize that soldiers are still men, still Englishmen (even if they
have, by becoming soldiers, lost their birthright of appeal to the Law
of the Land, though not their amenability to its authority), and cease
to make the Blessed Sabbath a curse, the worst day of the week, and to
herd angry, resentful soldiers into church to blaspheme with politely
pious faces? Oh, British, British, Pharisees and Humbugs--make Sunday
a curse, and drive the soldier into church to do his cursing--make it
the chief day of dress "crimes" and punishments, as well as the
busiest day, and force the soldier into church to Return Thanks....

The only man in the world flung into church as though into jail for
punishment! Shout it in the Soldier's ear, "_You are not a Man, you
are a Slave_," on Sundays also, on Sundays louder than usual.... And
when he has spent his Sunday morning in extra hard labour, in
suffering the indignity of being compulsorily marched to church, and
very frequently of having been punished because it is a good day on
which a Sergeant may decide that he is not sufficiently cleanly shaved
or his boots of minor effulgence--then let him sit and watch his hot
Sunday dinner grow stone cold before the Colonel stalks through the
room, asks a perfunctory question, and he is free to fall to.

"O Day of Rest and Gladness,
O Day of Joy most Bright...."

_Yah!_

A pity some of the energy that went to making the annual 20,000
military "criminals" out of honest, law-abiding, well-intending men
could not go to harassing the Canteen instead of the soldier (whom the
Canteen swindles right and left, and whence _he_ gets salt-watery
beer, and an "ounce" of tobacco that will go straight into his pipe in
one "fill"--no need to wrap it up, thank you) and discovering how
handsome fortunes, as well as substantial "illegal gratifications,"
are made out of his much-stoppaged one-and-tuppence-a-week.

Did the Authorities really yearn to _dis_coura