Chapter XIV
In Camp
I have often remarked that English writers use the word “depression” much more frequently than do writers on this side of the water, and I have often wondered what could be the reason for this. I had not passed one week in England before I knew. A few days in an English military camp will give one an idea of what depression is.
The military camp to which we were sent was Bramshott—a great collection of long, low, one-story huts, built row on row, with a door at each end, opening into muddy lanes that ran the whole length of the camp. It was raining mildly the evening we arrived and we marched in the darkness for three miles along soft muddy roads, and now and again we splashed through a puddle, though we tried to avoid them.
There seems to be an especially slippery quality about the mud of England,—to say nothing of that of France—that makes it very difficult to retain one’s balance. My cane, which according to military regulations I always carried, for the first time now proved useful. Day after day as the soldiers of the camp drilled in the soft, muddy squares, their movements resembled sliding more than orderly marching. Sometimes thick pads of the soft, yellow mud clung heavily to their feet; very often a gentle drizzle of rain fell, and nearly always the sky was dark grey and sombre, so that one wondered no longer why the word “depression” should be so frequently used in English literature.
But notwithstanding the mud and the dark skies, many of us grew to like England. There were many quaint, winding roads hedged in places with hawthorne bushes or spruce or boxwood. These led us into delightful little country villages with their old free-stone churches, sometimes covered with ivy that often ran for a long distance up the old Norman tower.