And they had so much to make them happy, too. All their work was over
at eight in the morning, and for the rest of the day they could lie
on their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies.
They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and
then threw themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till
it was cool enough to go out with their 'towny,' whose vocabulary
contained less than six hundred words, and the Adjective, and whose
views on every conceivable question they had heard many times before.

There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance Room
with the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any profession cannot
read for eight hours a day in a temperature of 96 degrees or 98 degrees
in the shade, running up sometimes to 103 degrees at midnight. Very
few men, even though they get a pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer
and hide it under their cots, can continue drinking for six hours a
day. One man tried, but he died, and nearly the whole regiment went
to his funeral because it gave them something to do. It was too early
for the excitement of fever or cholera. The men could only wait and
wait and wait, and watch the shadow of the barrack creeping across the
blinding white dust. That was a gay life.

They lounged about cantonments--it was too hot for any sort of game,
and almost too hot for vice--and fuddled themselves in the evening,
and filled themselves to distension with the healthy nitrogenous food
provided for them, and the more they stoked the less exercise they
took and more explosive they grew. Then tempers began to wear away,
and men fell a-brooding over insults real or imaginary, for they had
nothing else to think of. The tone of the repartees changed and
instead of saying light-heartedly: 'I'll knock your silly face in.'