Explore "The New Army in Training" by Rudyard Kipling on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
_Larai meṅ laddu nahiṅ batte_ (War is not sugar-plums). -_Hindi Proverb._
Working from the East to the West of England, through a countryside alive with troops of all arms, the car came at dusk into a cathedral town entirely inhabited by one type of regiment. The telegraph-office was an orderly jam of solid, large, made men, with years of discipline behind them and the tan of Indian suns on their faces-Englishmen still so fresh from the troopships that one of them asked me, ‘What's the day o' the month? ' They were advising friends of their arrival in England, or when they might be expected on short leave at the week's end; and the fresh-faced telegraph girls behind the grilles worked with six pairs of hands apiece and all the goodwill and patience in the world to back them. That same young woman who, with nothing to do, makes you wait ten minutes for a penny stamp while she finishes a talk with a lady-friend, will, at a crisis, go on till she drops, and keep her temper throughout. ‘Well, _if_ that's her village,' I heard one of the girls say to an anxious soul, ‘I tell _you_ that that will be her telegraph-office. You leave it to me. _She'll_ get it all right.'