On wet
mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his cot, and
thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down the aisle,
were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we wondered
anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our buttons, boots
or belts, or whether he would "spot" the books and jam jars hidden
behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent and civilian as
a book--and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam jar--must be visible
on your barrack-room shelf. It is sacred to equipment, and particularly
to the folded great-coat.
"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of
the many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There was,
I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable. The
great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to the
eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line (if a
pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three
polished buttons peeping through.
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