Their existence in the camp was a standing menace to discipline. Officially they were men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary punished according to the scheme designed for and in the main suitable to men. In reality they were boys, growing boys, some of them not sixteen years of age, a few--the thing seems almost incredible--not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a fighting man remains mysterious. But they did. These were besides boys of a certain particularly difficult kind. It is not your "good" boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells a lie about his age. It is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and endure the hardships of a soldier's life for the sake of seeing fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the makings of men in them if properly treated. The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane C.O. wants to condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most C.O.'s., even most sergeants, know that punishment of that kind, however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally unsuitable for a boy. At the same time if any sort of discipline is to be preserved, a boy, who must officially be regarded as a man, cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey orders. That was the military difficulty. The social and moral difficulty was, if anything, worse. Those boys were totally useless to the army where they were, stuck in a large camp. They were learning all sorts of evil and very little good. They were a nuisance to the N.C.O.'s and men, among whom they lived, and were bullied accordingly. They were getting no education and no suitable physical training. They were in a straight way to be ruined instead of made. It was an Irish surgeon who realised the necessity for doing something for these boys and set about the task. I do not suppose that he wants his name published or his good deeds advertised. I shall call him J. He was a typical Irishman--in looks, manner, and character one of the most Irishmen I have ever met. He had a wonderful talent for dealing with young animals. The very first time I met him he took me to see a puppy, a large, rather savage-looking creature which he kept in a stable outside the camp. One of the creature's four grandparents had been a wolf. J. hoped to make the puppy a useful member of society. "I am never happy," he said, "unless I have some young thing to train--dog, horse, anything. That's the reason I'm so keen on doing something for these boys."