chool that hadn't
something to say." Yet on the whole I am surprised how well the officers
can give us the gist of their subjects.

Our best speaker so far (excepting always the General, who has a way of
getting at us that explains his success) was a youngish doctor, who gave
us a plain talk concerning personal hygiene. When he spoke of
cleanliness, briefly referring to it as a matter of course, I thought of
a man whom I had seen on the beach that afternoon, Wednesday, looking at
his feet and exclaiming in disgust: "Look at them! And I washed them
Monday morning!" Some of our lads, who come here with expenses paid by
their employers, have a little to learn in this particular.

But to return to our doctor. He was very jocose, expressed himself in
perfectly decent men's slang, and kept us laughing _with_ him all the
time, while at the same time he drove home his advice. And yet it was
very striking how once, not disrespectfully, the men laughed _at_ him.
While speaking of our diet he said, "I advise you to eat freely of the
excellent fruit provided at the camp table." Now with us fruit, cooked or
raw, is almost lacking, and nothing exasperates me quite so much, when I
remember the wonderful apples that were just ripening at home, as to see
the small bruised insipid fruit that they serve us here. So the men began
to laugh, quietly at first; but the laughter rippled from one end of the
crowd to the other, and then rose in waves, and then boomed louder and
louder, in one great hearty roar. Whether or not the doctor saw the
point, it was worth taking.

Today we went on outpost duty, posting our squads at proper vantage
points along the further edge of our old familiar field, beyond the
trenches where Vera was trapped. The lieutenant took us out, explaining
as he went, dropping a squad on every-other rise of the ground, and
leaving its corporal to post his men. Soon we were strung out along half
a mile of rough country, a railroad in our front, and beyond it the
enemy's territory. Looking from our vantage-point it was hard to suppose
that the barren pasture was hiding all our men. Of them we saw but two,
an advance post lying on the hither side of the railroad embankment,
peering over the top, and our squad's own foremost man at his place where
he could command a railroad cut. The rest were hidden in little hollows,
in scattered clumps of pine, or in patches of scrub oak. After a while
along came the visiting patrol, directe