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and get yer hair cut.”
    There is a dreadful finality about this. Condemned men in American jails feel the same cold thrill that we feel, when their head is shaved to facilitate the passing of the shock that kills them.
    “Haircut. Then medical inspection. Then good night,” says the glum man, rising and flipping away his cigarette end.
    We go out. The wire-haired boy is as pale as ashes.
    The rain holds off. The wind has stopped. The world is holding its breath. There is an awful silence in the barracks. I have a dreadful feeling that the world has paused in its spinning. Looking up, I see something that makes me jump. Sixteen barrage balloons stand still in the air. They look like bombs which have been falling but have stopped dead with the wind, the world, and time. In a moment there will be a sickening jerk…. Everything will move again…. Bugles will bray, the bombs will fall, and as life moves, so it will cease to move in one last red whirl of disintegration.
    There is a dreamlike quality about this place, at this time.
    First day at the Depot! It is too new to be real. We look round at the bare plane of concrete, as a new-born baby, being smacked into life, looks down at the counterpane. We don’t see it, but it gets into our minds. We’ll never quite remember, and never quite forget, what it looks like.
    “If they spoil my quiff,” says Barker, fluffing up his forelock, “blimey if I don’t run away to sea.”
    We straggle into the barber’s shop.
    Later we were to hear dark, emphatic tales of barrack barbers; old soldiers’ stories, punctuated with fearful oaths and paragraphed with pregnant pauses, of atrocities committed with 4-0 Clippers on unsuspecting skulls. Ah, the good Old Soldier! He will make a history of oppression and a drama of unutterable crime out of every grain of sand in the midday cabbage.
    Months later I was to hear Sergeant Tug’s tale of early sufferings in the barber’s chair.
    Tug, with burning eyes, talking of that barber as an Armenian might talk of Turks; thrusting forward his flat-nosed, stubborn-jawed, dour, hard face, morosely smiling, and saying:
    “You’re issued with a comb. Get it? A comb. And a brush. D’you foller me? A brush. What are you issued with a brush and a comb for? Answer me that? What for, I ask? I’ll tell you what for. To comb and brush your hair. Do you see that? To comb and brush your hair.Now listen to me. Some blokes round this camp are vague, if you get what I mean, vague about haircutting regulations. Right. Some say your hair mustn’t be more than two inches long on top. Be that as it may. I say, you got to be left with sufficient hair to brush and comb. King’s Regulations, by God! And to crop a man’s head is to defy the King. To defy the King and country! Do you foller me? It’s like saying Pooey to King George the Sixth. It’s like putting your thumb to your nose and wiggling all your fingers at Winston Churchill and the whole British Government, to go and take all the hair off of a man’s head.
    “So. I was proud of my headervair. Laugh. But I had a headervair any woman might have been proud of. Oh, I know it’s a lot of bull. But I was a youngster. And I tell you, I was proud of that headervair. And I says to the barber: ‘Leave it on top,’ and he says to me: ‘God blimey, where d’you think you are? In a bleeding orchestra? Fond of music, are you? A pansy, ha?’ And I says to the barber: ‘I’m not fond of music—cut out the insults.’ And he says to me: ‘Bend your ’ead forward and cut out the back answers.’ And I says to him: ‘Cut off that top bit that waves and so help me I won’t stand for it,’ and he says: ‘Oh, then lie down to it, Paderooski.’ And I waits. And I feels them clippers going up my neck, and so help me God Almighty in Heaven, I feels them clippers going right up to the top of my head. And I jumps out of that chair and I runs out of the barber’s shop, and I goes on parade with me hair