Our regiments had their bands, and many of them their special marching tunes. But we somehow came to regard music as part of the peace-time, ornamental side of soldiering. The mistake was natural enough. Our military leaders recognised, far sooner than the rest of us, that this war was going to be a grim and desperate business. Bands struck them as out of place in it. Music was associated in their minds with promenades at seaside resorts, with dinners at fashionable restaurants, with ornamental cavalry evolutions at military tournaments. We were not going to France to do musical rides or to stroll about the sands of Boulogne with pretty ladies. We were going to fight. Therefore, bands were better left at home. It was a very natural mistake to make; but it was a mistake, and it is all to the credit of the War Office, a body which gets very little credit for anything, that it gradually altered its policy. At first we had no outdoor music except what the men produced themselves, unofficially, by singing, by whistling, or with mouth-organs. Indoors there were pianos in most recreation huts, and the piano never had a moment's rest while the huts were open--a proof, if any one wanted a proof, of the craving of the men for music. Then bands were started privately by the officers in different camps. This was a difficult and doubtful business. Funds had to be collected to buy instruments. Musicians who could play the instruments had to be picked out from among the men, and nobody knew how to find them. Hardly anybody stayed long in these base camps, and a good musician might at any moment be reft away and sent up the line. Yet bands came into existence. An Irish division started the first I came across, and it used to play its men to church on Sundays in a way that cheered the rest of us. My friend M.'s camps on top of the hill started a band. Other camps, which could not manage bands, discovered Scottish pipers and set them playing on ceremonial occasions. Later on in another place I found an excellent band in a large Canadian hospital, and a convalescent camp started a band which went for route marches along with the men. But these were all voluntary efforts. The best that could be said for the higher authorities is that they did not actually discourage them. The regimental bands, which we ought to have had in France, still remained at home, and I do not know that they did much playing even there. I think it was the Brigade of Guards which first brought a band out to France. It used to play in the market-place of the town which was then G.H.Q. Later on another Guards' band went on tour round the different bases. There was no mistake about the warmth of its reception. The officers and men gathered in large numbers to listen to it on the fine Sunday afternoon when it played in the camp where I was stationed.