Four weary months we spent beside that miserable stream, our escort on the Burmese side, the Chinese escort on the farther bank, occupying our time in sending urgent appeals to Government, and in holding endless conferences with our Chinese colleagues. Our men, disciplined and well equipped, were under canvas, properly rationed and cared for by our medical officer. Among them were a few Kachins recently enlisted, very smart and proud of their new uniforms. Boots were to them at once a source of glory and of pain. Most of them marched bare-footed, carrying the precious but weary burden slung on their shoulders. In a village they put them on and swaggered about for the admiration of the girls. Hardy and brave, these mountaineers are likely to prove excellent material for military police, perhaps even for the regular army. This season they were blooded in a small affair which Mr. H. F. Hertz had with an intrusive body of Chinese. They were among the first to scale the enemy’s stockade. There are now several companies of Kachins in the battalions at Bhamo and Myitkyina. General Liu had his hundred Chinese braves, clad in picturesque rags, undisciplined, armed with the latest thing in rifles, which they had no idea how to use. They carried no tents, and had to house themselves in huts of leaf and bamboo. The comfortable arrangements made for our military police filled them with envy, and they gratefully accepted the attention of our surgeon. We could have enlisted as many as we pleased if we had wished to raise a Chinese battalion. They impressed us as being good raw material and quite well behaved, but in their existing conditions entirely useless as a fighting force. The futility of Chinese troops against a disciplined army has been abundantly exemplified on this frontier. Notwithstanding warnings and alarms in the Press of the presence of formidable arrays trained by German or Japanese instructors, and armed with rifles of the very newest pattern, we have never encountered from Yunnan a Chinese levy capable of standing up to our military police, far less to a British force of all arms.