It was a very long time before I could gain admittance.  The servant who had been carrying the lantern had arrived, and, missing me, imagined that I must have returned to the house at which I had dined.  The men with whom I chummed, thinking it unlikely that I should make a second attempt to return home, had carefully fastened all the doors, momentarily expecting the roof of the house to be blown off.  I had to continue hammering and shouting for a long time before they heard and admitted me, thankful to be comparatively safe inside a house.

By morning the worst of the storm was over, but not before great damage had been done.  The Native bazaar was completely wrecked, looking as if it had suffered a furious bombardment, and great havoc had been made amongst the European houses, not a single verandah or outside shutter being left in the station.  As I walked to the mess, I found the road almost impassable from fallen trees; and dead birds, chiefly crows and kites, were so numerous that they had to be carried off in cartloads.  How I had made my way to my bungalow without accident the night before was difficult to imagine.  Even the column against which I had stumbled was levelled by the fury of the blast.  This column had been raised a few years before to the memory of the officers and men of the 1st Troop, 1st Brigade, Bengal Horse Artillery, who were killed in the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1841.  It was afterwards rebuilt.

Dum-Dum in ruins was even more dreary than before the cyclone, and I felt as if I could not possibly continue to live there much longer.  Accordingly I wrote to my father, begging him to try and get me sent to Burma; but he replied that he hoped soon to get command of the Peshawar division, and that he would then like me to join him.  Thus, though my desire to quit Dum-Dum was not to be immediately gratified, I was buoyed up by the hope that a definite limit had now been placed to my service in that, to me, uninteresting part of India, and my restlessness and discontent disappeared as if by magic.

In time of peace, as in war, or during a cholera epidemic, a soldier’s moral condition is infinitely more important than his physical surroundings, and it is in this respect, I think, that the subaltern of the present day has an advantage over the youngster of forty years ago.  The life of a young officer during his first few months of exile, before he has fallen into the ways of his new life and made friends for himself, can never be very happy; but in these days he is encouraged by the feeling that, however distasteful, it need not necessarily last very long; and he can look forward to a rapid and easy return to England and friends at no very distant period.  At the time I am writing of he could not but feel completely cut off from all that had hitherto formed his chief interests in life—­his family and his friends—­for ten years is an eternity to the young, and the feeling of loneliness and home-sickness was apt to become almost insupportable.