Only the guns of the Allies and the steel of their dauntless infantrymen can enlighten a people so hopelessly deluded as the Germans of to-day. But for the rest of the world I believe there is much in this little collection of the frank, unstudied writings of an average New Army officer, who, prior to the War, was a clerk in a suburban office, to show that sportsmanship and leadership are qualities characteristic of every single division of the Anglo-Saxon social systems; and that, perhaps more readily than any other race, we can produce from every class and every country in the English-speaking half of the world, men who make the finest possible kind of active service officers; men who, though their commissions may be "Temporary" and their names innocent of a "von," or any other prefix, are not only fine officers, but, permanently, and by nature, gentlemen and sportsmen. Withal, it may be that I should be falling short of complete fulfilment of a duty which I am glad and proud to discharge, if I omitted to furnish any further information regarding the personality of the writer of these letters. And so, if the reader will excuse yet another page or two of wire entanglement between himself and the actual trenches--the letters, I mean--I will try to explain. A. J. DAWSON, _Captain_. LONDON, 1918. THE GENESIS OF THE "TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN" In the case of the Service Battalion officer of Britain's New Army who, with humorous modesty, signs himself "Your 'Temporary Gentleman,'" what is there behind that enigmatic signature that his letters do not tell us? The first of these homely epistles shows their writer arriving with his Battalion in France; and the visit is evidently his first to that fair land, since he writes: "I wonder if I should ever have seen it had there been no war!" That exclamation tells a good deal. But of the man and his antecedents prior to that moment of landing with his unit in France, the letters tell us nothing; and if it be true that the war has meant being "born again" for very many Englishmen, that frequently quoted statement at all events points to the enjoyment of some definite status before the war.