Now picture a sniper. Less funny?

An army marches on its stomach, but also on its fly-front fastenings. Not that the zipper—although improving the speed of opening—has been entirely blameless. Why not? Use your heads—zippers get stuck. And they’re noisy! And men have developed the dangerous habit of striking matches on them. In the dark! You might as well set a flare.

Many have been the crimes committed—she continues—on helpless enlisted men by the designers of military clothing. How many British soldiers died needlessly because of the redness of their uniforms? And don’t think that sort of thoughtlessness went out with the nineteenth century. Mussolini’s criminal failure to provide shoes—shoes!—for his own troops was just one case in point. And, in Tony’s opinion, whoever dreamed up those nylon pants for North Korea should have been court-martialled. You could hear the legs whisking together a mile away. And the sleeping bags—they rustled too, and you couldn’t undo them easily from inside, and they froze shut! During night raids by the enemy, those men got butchered like kittens in a sack.

Murder by designer! She can get quite worked up about it. All of which, in a more sedate and footnoted form, will be good for at least one chapter of her book-in-progress: Deadly Vestments: A History of Inept Military Couture.

Charis says it’s bad for Tony to spend so much of her time on something as negative as war. She says it’s carcinogenic.

Tony searches through her accordion file for the class list, locates it under B, for Bureaucracy, and enters the grade for each paper in the little square provided. When she’s finished she drops the marked papers into the heavy manila envelope thumbtacked to the outside of her door, where the students can pick them up later today, as promised. Then she continues to the end of the hall, checks for mail in the squalid cubbyhole of a departmental office where there is sometimes a secretary, finds nothing but a renewal notice forJane’s Defence Weekly and her latest copy of Big Guns, and tucks both into her bag.