There was one occasion on which such a summons arrived just as the men had assembled to welcome a concert party. The dining-room was empty in five minutes. We who remained were faced with the prospect of a concert without an audience. But our sergeant-major met the emergency. He hurried to a neighbouring camp and somehow managed to borrow two hundred men. The concert party was greatly pleased, but said that the Emergency Stretcher-bearers did not look as old and dilapidated as they had been led to expect. There came a time when the camp changed and many old friends disappeared. At the beginning of the Somme battle there was a sudden demand for stretcher-bearers to serve at the advanced dressing-stations. Almost every day we were bidden to send men. Little parties assembled on the parade ground and marched off to entrain for the front. I used to see them lined up on the parade ground, war-battered men, who looked old though they were young, with their kits spread out for inspection. The least unfit went first; but indeed there was little choice among them. Not a man of them but had been wounded grievously or mourned a constitution broken by hardship. Yet they went cheerfully, patient in their dumb devotion to duty, hopeful that the final victory for which they had striven in vain was near at hand at last. "We'll have peace before Christmas." So they said to me as they went. That "Peace before Christmas"! It has fluttered, a delusive vision, before our men since the start. "Is it true that the cavalry are through?" I suppose that was another delusion, that riding down of a flying foe by horsemen. But it was not only the stretcher-bearers who clung to it. We saw our friends no more after they disappeared into the smoking furnace of the front. They were scattered here and there among the dressing-stations in the fighting area. Many of them, I suppose, stayed there, struck down at last, ending their days in France as they began them, with the sound of the guns in their ears. Others, perhaps, drifted back to England more hopelessly broken than ever. They must be walking our streets now with silver badges on the lapels of their coats, and we, who are much meaner men, should take our hats off to them. A few may be toiling still, where the fighting is thickest, the last remnants of the "Old Contemptibles."