After censoring about 100 of my Company's letters I feel this will be
a very incorrect performance. What strikes one too is the great gain
in piquancy of style achieved by the omission of all punctuation. How
could I equal this for instance "The Bible says this is a land of milk
and honey there is plenty of water and dust about if thats what they
mean?" or "The sentry shot an Arab one night soon after we got here I
saw him soon afterwards caught him in the chest a treat it did."
I'm so glad to hear that Foss is getting on well: let me know the
extent and nature of the damage. We hardly ever get a casualty list
here: and I can't take that to mean there have been none lately: so my
news of fractured friends hangs on the slender thread of the safe
arrival of my _Times_ every week--and on you and others who are not
given to explaining that Bloggs will have given me all the news, no
doubt.
The War Office, fond as ever of its little joke, having written my
C.O. a solemn letter to say they couldn't entertain the idea of my
promotion seeing that under the Double Coy. system the establishment
of Captains is reduced to seven and so on, and having thereby induced
him to offer me the unique felicity of bringing a draft to this merry
land, has promptly gazetted my promotion, and antedated it to April
2nd, so that I find myself a Double Coy. Commander and no end of a
blood. My importance looks more substantial on paper than on parade:
for of the 258 men in "A" Double Coy. I can never muster more than
about thirty in the flesh. You see so many have overeaten themselves
on the ice and fresh vegetables which Austen dwelt upon in the H. of
C. or have caught chills from the supply of punkahs and fans (_ib._)
that 137 have been invalided to India and twenty-five more are sick
here. Then over fifty are on jobs which take them away from the Coy.
and from ten to twenty go on guards every day. However my dignity is
recognised by the grant of a horse and horse allowance.
Unless it is postponed again, the great battle up-river should be
coming off to-day. I hope it is, as it is the coolest day we've had
since April. In fact it is a red-letter day, being the first on which
the temperature has failed to reach 100° in this room. You wouldn't
believe me how refreshing a degree 96° can be.
We have also heard fairy-tale like rumours of an advance of Four
Thousand Yards in France, but I have not seen it in black and white
yet.
Having so few men available there are not many parades, in fact from 7
to 8 a.m. about four times a week is all that I've been putting in.
And as a tactful Turk sank the barge containing all my Company's
documents sometime in July there is an agreeable shortage of office
business. So I am left to pass a day of cultured leisure and to
meditate on the felicity of the Tennysonian "infinite torment of
flies." I read Gibbon and Tennyson and George Eliot and the _Times_ by
turns, with intervals of an entertaining work, the opening sentence of
which is "Birds are warm-blooded vertebrate animals oviparous and
covered with feathers, the anterior limbs modified into wings, the
skull articulating with the vertebral column by a single occipital
condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather
fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am
discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It
needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over,
twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past
and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no
vowels and four z's--so _unnecessary_, isn't it, as my Aunts would
say.
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