336 A Sportswoman in India 



cricket, etc., but people may live as quietly as they 

 please, giving themselves up to an outdoor life of 

 hunting, shooting, and fishing. 



Life at Ootacamund is not a study of Anglo-Indian 

 life ; a truer example is met with down in the plains 

 in an ordinary military station. 



There one is struck first of all with the deadly 

 monotony of the place : why were all the roads ruled 

 with such withering precision and with such ultra- 

 correct angles? 



Cantonments must have come into being upon the 

 face of an open, empty plain, planned purely on 

 utilitarian lines as opposed to the beautiful. But 

 the art of warfare is not a beautiful one it is only 

 useful from a barbarous point of view ; consequently, 

 in the nature of things a military station should be 

 a cut-and-dried settlement. Not only are the roads 

 cruelly straight and far removed from " the galloping 

 track " loved of wayward nature, but " the walrus and 

 the carpenter" would have broken their hearts over 

 the sand and dust. 



An eminent general once asserted that could all 

 sand and dust, which, in his opinion, were the great 

 agents in breeding and disseminating fever and other 

 germs, be swept from the face of cantonments, Tommy 

 Atkins would be another lad. Quite so. And if the 

 clouds were invaded in balloons and stirred up to rain 

 at convenient periods . . . and if wishes were horses 

 . . . Unfortunately, the world is worked on a present 

 tense, not a subjunctive mood, system. 



