"Just a few lines to let you know how we are getting on, hoping this finds you in the pink as it leaves me at present. We are getting very near the Germans now, and you can take it from me they'll get what for when we come up with 'em. The grub here is champion, but we are always ready for more, and I shan't be sorry to get that parcel you told me of. Please put in a few fags next time. The French people have a queer way of talking so you can't always understand all they say, but they're all right, I can tell you, when you get to know 'em, and I can sling their bat like one o'clock now. It's quite easy once you get the hang of it, this bong jor and pang parley voo. Milk is lay, and not too easy to get. The boys are all in the pink, and hoping you're the same, so no more at present," etc. One sometimes gets mad with them for trifles, but for all the things that really matter--God bless 'em all! By Jove! they _are_ Britons. They're always "in the pink" and most things are "champion," and when the ration-wagon's late and a man drops half his whack in the mud, he grins and says, "The Army of to-day's all _right_"; and that, wait till he gets into the trenches, he'll smarten the Boches up for that! Oh, but they are splendid; and though one gets into the way of thinking and saying one's own men are the best in the Army, yet, when one means business one knows very well the whole of the New Army's made of the same fine stuff. Why, in my platoon, and in our Company for that matter, they are every mother's son of them what people at home call rough, ignorant fellows. And I admit it. Rough they certainly are; and ignorant, too, by school standards. But, by Jingo! their hearts are in the right place, and I'd back any one of them against any two goose-stepping Boches in the Kaiser's Prussian Guard. And, with it all, mind you, they're so English. I mean they are _kind_, right through to their bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to the strafing of Boches; but that's because the Boche is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. You couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 'em all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl and sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all the powers of Germany and Austria could make baby-killers, women-slayers, and church-destroyers of these chaps of ours. If I know anything about it, they are fine soldiers, but the Kaiser himself--"Kayser," they call him--couldn't make brutes and bullies of 'em. Warm their blood--and, mind you, you can do it easily enough, even with a football in a muddy field, when they've been on carrying fatigues all day--and, by Jove! there's plenty of devil in 'em. God help the men in front of 'em when they've bayonets fixed! But withal they're English sportsmen all the time, and a French child can empty their pockets and their haversacks by the shedding of a few tears.