"TOMMY'S" NEW HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 3292, 18 April 1917, Page 54

"TOMMY'S" NEW HOME.

THE NISSEX HUT. At about the same time as the tanks made their memorable debut on the battlefield, another creature, almost equally pTimseval of aspect, began to appear in the conquered areas (writes Filson Young in the Daily Mail). Xo one ever saw it on the move or met it on the roads; it just' appeared. Overnight you "would see a blank space of ground ; in the morning it would- be occupied by an immense creature of the tortoise species, settled down solidly and permanently on the earth, and emitting green smoke from a right-angled stem at one end, where its mouth might- be. as though it were smoking a morning pipe. And when such a pioneer found that the situation was good, and the land habitable, it would apparently pass the word; for by twos and threes, by tens and hundreds, its fellowmonsters would appear, so that in a week or two you would find a valley covered with them that had been nothing but pulverised earth before. The name of this creature is the Nissen hut. It is the solution of one of the many problems that every war presents. The problem hero was to devise a cheap,

portable dwelling-placo wherein men could live warm and dry; cheap enough to be purchasable by tens of thousands; portable enough to be carried on any road; big enough to house two dozen men; simple enough to be erected by anybody and on . any ground; and weather-proof enough to give adequate protection from summer heat and winter cold. All these conditions are fulfilled by the Nissen hut, the invention of a Canadian engineer officer, who sat down and thought it out on an idle day in May, 1916. He did his preliminary thinking so well that the third hut he built is of the pattern now being used, of which there are at least 20,000 in the country to-day,,and which are the homes of some half-million of British Tommies. One peculiarity of the Nisen hut is that it has no walls. It consists of a roof, ends, and a lioor. The roof is simply an arch of corrugated iron, eo there are no eaves or gables to fit. Thus the greatest amount of standing space is enclosed with the least amount of material. You can order" a Nissen hut as you would order a garden chair, and it will arrive neatly packed,-with instructions how to put it up. Anyone can put it up; but four men can do it easily in four hours. The only tool required—a spanner —is supplied with it. The whole can be packed on an army waggon, and its weight is two tons; but no single part or packager is heavier than can be unloaded by two' men. All the parts are interchangeable. The whole thing rests on three longitudinal sills 27ft long. On these'you lay the panels of floorboarding. There are 12 of them; you can put them down in any order you like — they are all the same. The roof is in 48 pieces—all the same. You arrange them in three 9ft "Sheets, with a 6in overlap—that is, one corrugation of overlap. You go on fitting them together anyhow, in any order, and when they are all used you find that the roof is complete. Twenty-four men sleep warm and dry on their beds on the floor. By day the beds are rolled up against the sides and the whole middle space (which as a mess would seat 52 men) is available for work, games, messing, writing, or reading. The hut is warmed by the ordinary Canadian stove—an iron drum with two holes in it x and a smoke-pipe, which is the only portable furnace that you can make redhot on green wood fuel.