The cost of high living here is enormous. The stoop-shouldered, shrewd-eyed, flinty-hearted Yankee clerks behind the broad counters of the “Post Exchange” disdain anything less than a quarter. Dimes and nickels are chicken-feed, and pennies—impossible. If a chap buys one apple at five cents or one pear or one banana (always green and a long way from being ripe) he has to hide himself in the crowd to escape the baleful eye of these grasping sharks. Five cent crackers sell two boxes for a quarter, penny candies are five cents each, cigars and cigarettes are considerably above normal in price and considerably below in quality, and ice cream sells for ten cents a gram.

But none of us has grown up. We are all like big boys and we spend with no thought of to-morrow. Mess over, we all hie out to the two main roads that lead to the “Post Exchange,” jingling coins in our trouser pockets. The “Exchange” itself is a long, low unpainted building like all other buildings here with tiny back country windows, half-obscured by garments hanging within which leave only a few dirty squares for the dull yellow light to show through.

The doors are broad and through them streams a never ending line of troopers, some coming, some going. Inside, the place resembles nothing more than a huge up-country general store with shelves upon shelves stacked high with cracker boxes, shoe boxes, hardware and goodness only knows what not, while from the rafters hang heavy coats, sweaters, lanterns, huge stalks of green bananas, hams, bacon, boots and a lot of useless things that only gullible soldiers who feel a yearning to spend their money really purchase. But this spending of money somehow seems to bring us closer to civilization for the moment and we join the churning mass of men within, whose hobnailed shoes produce a great pounding and scraping sound and whose voices are raised in a constant babble of conversation which only the sharp ting, ting of the cash register bells can punctuate.

We mill around with the crowd, and soon are pushed against a counter. Something attracts our eye. We feel a desire to possess it. We buy it, and start milling about the room again until presently we are near the door. Then we step out into the night again and join one of the groups of loiterers or sit about on boxes and piles of lumber, where we devour our purchase, if it happens to be in the line of crackers (which is usually the case), or admire it, if it happens to be a pocket flash lamp, a fountain pen or something else that we really never have had any use for.

The small-town idea prevails even in the city of thirty thousand lonesome men. The “Post Exchange” and the “Post Office” are the two centres of interest. First we wander to one, and then we wander to the other, then with time on our hands we join the stream of men going up one side of the road “just walkin’” and when we reach the point where most of the crowd turns back, we turn back, too, and continue our “walkin’,” with no particular place to go, until the streets begin to get deserted and it is time for the town to close up. Then we disappear, too, and for an hour occupy ourselves in the barracks until taps are sounded and lights are out, when we go to bed; the place I’m headed for now, so soon as I put the top on my fountain pen.