Highland Regiments footwear during the Great War

[Laird O'the Cowcaddens]

Looking back I can laugh at all the "Basic Training" imaginative practices we endured in the first couple of months after induction. The first billet I was assigned to was called Napier Barracks, it was a open style with 16 beds on each wing with the ablutions in the middle of the building with a "Torpedo tube" crapper with a flusher valve at one end.
It had coal stoves in the middle of each wing and waxed and "bumpered" the floors with a long handled short haired brush and an old piece of blanket for extra shine. The beds were exactly the ones shown in the photo, and they sagged badly if some of the metal clips were absent, so you sometimes had to wire them closed. Bye the way, we called the sheet and blanket thing a :bed block". I had not thought of these things in nearly 50 years. All my yesterdays, thanks for the memories.