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
drinking 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. Then tempers began to wear away, and men fell a-brooding over insults
real or imaginary, for they had nothing else to think of. The tone of the
repartees changed, and instead of saying light-heartedly: "I'll knock your
silly face in," men grew laboriously polite and hinted that the cantonments
were not big enough for themselves and their enemy, and that there would he
more space for one of the two in another place.
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