During the first week regularly every afternoon out on the work a wind would blow up a dust storm, the sky would blacken, and at about 4 o’clock the rain would burst on us and lift again after about a couple of hours. Daily the weather grew more oppressive and the men in the know pronounced that this was the typical prelude to the monsoon. They were right. On about May 22nd, during the night, the monsoon broke on us. From now on, for four and a half solid months, the monsoon was with us. As this history unfolds you must always see and hear and feel rain, rain, rain. You worked in the rain, you ate in the rain, and it rained through your leaky tent at night; never were you dry. And mud! The camp slope was as slippery as a brown ice rink; a journey to cookhouse or latrine, particularly by night, meant often falling into a pool of water, or slipping up on your way and coming back to the tent with two inches of mud and muck on your boots and an inch of it coated on the seat of your shorts. After two days the road was a continuous morass, often rutted and banked up with feet of glutinous mud, and every day the rain made it worse. Wet clothes stayed wet – how could you dry them? Before you left your tent in the morning you groped in the gloom to pile all your kit under a ground sheet or gas-cape in a dry spot; when you returned, half your bed would inevitably be soaking wet.

Though tents of pre-archaic model were still coming slowly in, most of the men lived in their shacks for at least a month; these shacks didn’t keep out more than half the rain, and it always showered through the roof in a fine spray, so that they slept on sodden sacks, in soaking wet near-nudity, night after night. The floors of these shacks were inches deep in slimy mud. For such accommodation the officers were theoretically paying 42 dollars a month.