Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
At the all-familiar sound of its name the bird suddenly ceased its monotonous beak and claw gymnastics for a space, becoming on the instant alertly attentive. There came a preliminary craning of neck and winking of white-parchment-lidded eyes, and then, in shockingly human fashion it proceeded to give voluble utterance to some startling samples of barrack-room profanity.
"Thank God, thank God!" he fervently exclaimed: "I have not then even the death of poor Donellan to answer for;" and hastening from the guard-room, he pursued his course hurriedly and delightedly to the barrack-room of his friend.
About midnight I awoke, as if from a troubled sleep, and beheld my parents bending over my couch, whilst the regimental surgeon, with a candle in his hand, stood nigh, the light feebly reflected on the whitewashed walls of the barrack-room. Another circumstance connected with my infancy, and I have done.
Beholding with open face as in a glass a certain image, they were changed into the same image, by the spirit of the poet. This is certainly a greater achievement than correct reporting. It is quite possible, too, that the officers' attitude toward Tommy Atkins had been altered by the Barrack-Room Ballads, and this new attitude produced results in character.
By the time these preparations are complete the men are back from church; and after a brief attendance at stables to water and feed they assemble fully dressed in the barrack-room, hungrily silent. The captain enters the room and pro forma asks whether there are "any complaints?"
At one o'clock to-day the bell rung for prayers, and all hands were collected into the upper barrack-room of the beacon- house, when the usual service was performed. The wind blew very hard in the course of last night from N.E., and to-day the sea ran so high that no boat could approach the rock.
As an accompaniment to their labours, in desultory fashion, they kept alive the embers of a facetious wrangling argument their respective vocabularies, albeit more or less ensanguined, exhibiting a fluent and masterly range of quaint barrack-room idiom and invective.
Politicians and parliamentary leaders, supposed actually to be elected by the working classes, were regarded, rightly or wrongly, with implacable suspicion. The elderly and old-fashioned Anglo-Egyptian militarist, with his doctrine and discipline of the barrack-room and the drumhead court-martial, was never regarded by the workers with a shade of suspicion.
In the first place accommodation! At the opening of war we had barrack-room for 176,000 men. What to do with these capped, bare-headed, or straw-hatted multitudes who poured in at Lord Kitchener's call! They were temporarily housed somehow under every kind of shelter. But military huts for half a million men were immediately planned then for nearly a million.
Before he had been ten minutes in the room, men were rushing in all directions, fussing, jostling one another, coming, going, demanding of all the echoes in that huge white-washed barn of a barrack-room dormitory: "Where is the palliasse of Corporal Vinson!" "Find me the bolster of Corporal Vinson!"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking