Meanwhile as I have no letters of your’s to answer and no news to discuss, I will try and give you an account of myself and my fifty veterans since I last wrote.

The fifty just form a platoon.  You see, my retromotion goes on apace.  A Company Commander from August to April, a Company Second in Command from May to August, and now a platoon Commander.  I shall find the stage of Sergeant harder still to live up to if it comes to that.

Twenty-five are from ‘D’ Double Company; but only seven of these are from my own original lambs of ‘F’:  because they wouldn’t take anyone under twenty-three, and as I have mentioned before, I think, very few of ‘F’ have qualified for pensions.  As it is, two of the seven gave false ages.  The other twenty-five are from a Portsmouth Company—­townees mostly, and to me less attractive than the village genius:  but I daresay we shall get on all right.

Our start wasn’t altogether auspicious—­in fact taking a draft across the middle East is nearly as difficult to accomplish without loss as taking luggage across Scotland.  We had a very good send-off, and all that—­concert, dinner, band, crowd on the platform and all the moral alcohol appropriate to such occasions.  It was a week ago, to-day, when we left Agra, and Agra climate was in its top form, 96 deg. in the shade and stuffy at that.  So you can imagine that it was not only our spirits that were ardent after a mile’s march to the station in marching order at noon.  An hour after the train had started one of my lance-corporals collapsed with heat-stroke.  The first-aid treatment by the Eurasian M.O. travelling with us was a most instructive object lesson.  The great thing is to be in time.  We were summoned within ten minutes of the man’s being taken ill.  His temperature was already 106 deg.:  the M.O. said that in another half-hour it would have been 109 deg. and in an hour he would probably have been dead.  We stripped him stark, laid him in the full draught, and sponged him so as to produce constant evaporation:  held up the Punjab mail and got 22lbs. of ice to put under his head:  and so pulled him round in less than two hours.  We had to leave him at Jhansi though, and proceeded to Bombay forty-nine strong.

The ten-little-nigger-boy process continued at Bombay.  We arrived on board on Monday morning:  and though orders were formally issued that nobody was to leave the docks without a pass, no attempt was made to prevent the men spending the day in the town, which they all did.

On the Tuesday morning the crew told the men we should not be sailing till Wednesday:  and accordingly a lot of them went shopping again.  But for once in a way the ship actually sailed at the appointed time, 11 a.m. on Tuesday, and five of my gallant band were left behind.  However they were collected by the Embarkation Authorities, and together with their fellow-victims of nautical inaccuracy from the other drafts were sent up by special train to Karachi, where they rejoined us:  the C.O. according them a most unsympathetic reception, and sentencing them all (rather superfluously) to Confinement to Barracks for the remainder of the voyage.