The following day being Sunday the soldiers of the King go to service in full dress; the grim barracks are brilliant with hundreds of scarlet coats and to the music of Stars and Stripes Forever our one time foes move off to pray for peace while prepared for war. I notice that Hiawatha is the favourite tune for marching men, and am told that it is not only because it is a most excellent march but because the fife plays an important part in its rendering and the fife is the only instrument which can be heard above the din of battle.
Kilcoman Castle
Spenser's Home
Where he wrote The Faerie Queene
There is a drummer in this band whose movements are simply amazing, and I find myself trying to imitate them with pole and cane to the peril of life and property. How he does swing those great sticks around his head and bring them down upon that huge bass-drum! A drummer surely whose pomposity surpasses anything of its kind within my memory. As the inspiring music grows fainter and fainter and the scarlet coats pass away down the streets of the old town I turn for an inspection of the barracks. On the top of the entrance arch are the offices, on the right the guard-house, and beyond it a large gymnasium. On either side of the green and running at right angles to the entrance are the officers' quarters, while a large barracks for the men forms the fourth side of the square. Back of this is another square surrounded by large barracks, while the married men have a separate building beyond these and the Colonel lives in a retired pleasant house off in one corner. Of that house and the dwellers therein I have some very pleasant memories.
To a looker-on in this twentieth century the disregard of sanitary measures in such a barracks as this is surprising and I doubt not the same holds in all others of the Empire and perhaps in all those of other countries, including my own. Of that I am unable to speak, but the outrage is an outrage all the same. One can understand the lack of such things in far western camps or in war times, but that a great stone place like this with a hundred years to its credit should have no proper baths or toilet-rooms for its officers is "an outrage" most certainly, and one which the nation should insist upon being promptly corrected. There are a few bathrooms with good tubs and hot and cold water for the men but the officers have nothing save the inconvenient, nasty little tin tubs, and it is practically impossible for a big man to keep himself in proper condition by their use.
These quarters are, as I have stated, massive stone buildings. Each officer has a sitting-room with two small rooms adjoining and so placed that either of the latter could be transformed at small cost into an excellent bathroom with hot and cold water laid on. As it is now, these gentlemen must use a little tin thing with an inch or two of cold water. It's a common saying amongst the officers of the army that nothing is done for them. What the government does is all for the rank and file. That the soldiers should receive everything needful is in all ways proper, but are not the men who lead them, the brains of this strength of the nation, entitled to like consideration? They offer their lives upon the slightest cause, and gladly too, yet their government is so far forgetful, not to call it by a harsher term, that it neglects their well-being in this manner. They are willing to put up with nothing when it is necessary, and surely are entitled to a bare something, and this is nothing more, when it can so easily be done and at such small expense. Cleanliness is certainly more essential to health than many brilliant coats and much silver plate.