necessities.  They had annexed a small house and garden just opposite their tent, and here we could buy an excellent cup of tea or lemonade for one penny, as well as a variety of delectable buns, much in request.  So pressing was the demand for these light and cheap refreshments that the supply of cups and glasses gave out, and the lemonade was usually served out in old salmon or jam tins.  Very often, after a couple of hymns and, perhaps, a prayer, we went across and finished up the evening with a couple of buns and a cup of tea.  One of my ambulance comrades, an ex-baker from Johannesburg, was extremely good in helping on the success of the refreshment bar, and frequently stood for hours together at the receipt of custom.  The returns were very large.  One day, I remember, they amounted to L22 in pennies:  this would mean, I think, on a low estimate, that something like 1,500 soldiers used the temperance canteen on that evening.  Apart from this enterprising work, private gifts in the way of fruit occasionally arrived on the scene, and I well remember one day when almost every “Tommy” one met carried a pine apple in his hands.  In addition to such pleasures of realised satisfaction we enjoyed the pleasures of anticipation; for was not her Gracious Majesty’s chocolate en route for South Africa?  The amount of interest exhibited in the arrival of these chocolate boxes was amazing.  Men continually discussed them, and a stranger would have thought that chocolate was some essential factor in a soldier’s life, from which we had, by the exigencies of camp life, been long deprived!  As a matter of fact, portable forms of cocoa are extremely valuable in cases where normal supplies of food are cut off.  Every soldier on a campaign carries in his haversack a small tin labelled “emergency rations”.  This cannot be opened unless by order from a commanding officer and any infraction of the rule is severely punished.  At one end of the oblong tin are “beef rations,” at the other “chocolate rations,” enough to sustain a man amid hard and exhausting work for thirty-six hours.  The chocolate rations consist of three cubes and can be eaten in the dry state; once, however, I came across a spare emergency tin, and found that with boiling water a single cube made enough liquid chocolate for ten men, a cup each.  People make a great fuss in England if they don’t get three or four meals a day, but a healthy man can easily fight with much less nourishment than this.  I have seen Turkish troops during the Cretan insurrection live on practically nothing else than a few beans and a little bread, and on this meagre and precarious diet they fought like heroes.  In the Sudan a few bunches of raisins will keep one going all day.  At the same time, these things are to some extent relative to the individual.  I have known huge athletic men curl up in no time because they couldn’t get three meals a day on a campaign, whereas others, of half their build and muscle, may bear privations