I'm so glad to hear that Foss is getting on well: let me know the extent and nature of the damage. We hardly ever get a casualty list here: and I can't take that to mean there have been none lately: so my news of fractured friends hangs on the slender thread of the safe arrival of my Times every week—and on you and others who are not given to explaining that Bloggs will have given me all the news, no doubt.
The War Office, fond as ever of its little joke, having written my C.O. a solemn letter to say they couldn't entertain the idea of my promotion seeing that under the Double Coy. system the establishment of Captains is reduced to seven and so on, and having thereby induced him to offer me the unique felicity of bringing a draft to this merry land, has promptly gazetted my promotion, and antedated it to April 2nd, so that I find myself a Double Coy. Commander and no end of a blood. My importance looks more substantial on paper than on parade: for of the 258 men in "A" Double Coy. I can never muster more than about thirty in the flesh. You see so many have overeaten themselves on the ice and fresh vegetables which Austen dwelt upon in the H. of C. or have caught chills from the supply of punkahs and fans (ib.) that 137 have been invalided to India and twenty-five more are sick here. Then over fifty are on jobs which take them away from the Coy. and from ten to twenty go on guards every day. However my dignity is recognised by the grant of a horse and horse allowance.
Unless it is postponed again, the great battle up-river should be coming off to-day. I hope it is, as it is the coolest day we've had since April. In fact it is a red-letter day, being the first on which the temperature has failed to reach 100° in this room. You wouldn't believe me how refreshing a degree 96° can be.
We have also heard fairy-tale like rumours of an advance of Four Thousand Yards in France, but I have not seen it in black and white yet.
Having so few men available there are not many parades, in fact from 7 to 8 a.m. about four times a week is all that I've been putting in. And as a tactful Turk sank the barge containing all my Company's documents sometime in July there is an agreeable shortage of office business. So I am left to pass a day of cultured leisure and to meditate on the felicity of the Tennysonian "infinite torment of flies." I read Gibbon and Tennyson and George Eliot and the Times by turns, with intervals of an entertaining work, the opening sentence of which is "Birds are warm-blooded vertebrate animals oviparous and covered with feathers, the anterior limbs modified into wings, the skull articulating with the vertebral column by a single occipital condyle" and so on. I also work spasmodically at Hindustani. I rather fancy my handwriting in the Perso-Arabic script. Arabic proper I am discouraged from by the perverse economy of its grammar and syntax. It needs must have two plurals, one for under ten and one for over, twenty-three conjugations, and yet be without the distinction of past and future. Which is worse even than the Hindustani alphabet with no vowels and four z's—so unnecessary, isn't it, as my Aunts would say.
Amarah.
September 29, 1915.
To his Father.
One's system has got so acclimatised to high temperatures that I find it chilly and want my greatcoat to sit in at any temperature under 80°, under 100° is noticeably warm.