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Scarcely, however, were these boxes ensconced in their weather-proof niches in each traverse than they were condemned, and the sweating infantry who had brought them up returned them with many curses to store. The guns also left our sector in peace, which was the more fortunate as our artillery was not in a position to reply effectively to even a modest bombardment.
I was frequently a witness to the short space of time they took to erect their houses; and, though small, they are tight, weather-proof, and warm: their storehouses are put together in the most substantial and workmanlike manner. It is very difficult to make the New Zealanders explain the nature of their religious belief.
Refuse boards, shooks, stakes, etc., were placed thickly from the ridge-pole to the ground; a thick layer of straw was laid over these and the whole was covered a foot thick with earth and sods, well beaten down. A stone wall five feet high at back and sides made a most excellent fireplace; and these cabins were weather-proof and warm, even in zero weather.
Around the latter are seventy or eighty deep arches for the use of travellers. At the back of each is a little doorway, about three feet by three, leading into a dark, windowless stone chamber, unfurnished, smoke-blackened, and dirty, but dry and weather-proof. Any one may occupy these. Should the beggar arrive first, the prince is left out in the cold, and vice versâ.
We soon found the hut, but it was a mere ruin; it might have been in Chancery for any number of years, indeed one end had tumbled in. It was as uninviting a place to spend a night in as could well be imagined. Fortunately one corner was still weather-proof, the fir bark of the roof yet remaining intact.
Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by side across the general slope, with the captive officers' quarters, sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them. About their doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on the grass, where some of them lounged smoking.
The best part of our hospital the hospital, to most of us came into being when the commandeered Scottish baronial orphans' asylum was found to be too small. Then were built "the huts." The word "hut" suggests something casual, of the camping-out order: a shed knocked together with tin-tacks, doubtfully weather-proof and probably scamped by profiteering contractors.
In it he placed a cot bed and a stove, the remainder of its weather-proof interior being littered with blue prints, bills, and receipts. Before long these had resulted in the development of the skeleton of a pretentious main structure; its frame work suggesting quaint eaves and a broad piazza.
Most of the ladies sought the retirement of berths, and became invisible, though not necessarily inaudible; a few, who were happily weather-proof, jammed themselves into velvety corners, held on to something fixed, and lost themselves in books.
Stuffing the interstices with dried grass, and banking up the earth around it, she threw over it the wagon-top, which she fastened firmly to stakes driven in the ground, and thus provided a shelter tolerably rain-tight and weather-proof. Thither she conveyed the stoves and other contents of the wagon.
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