"Yesterday we watched them, bared to the waist, as they went through three hours of grenade and bombing practice that was the last word in strenuosity. Keeping up with their exercises was hard work for our men, whose arms soon began to ache from the unaccustomed, overhand heaving. "Then we watched them as their commander assembled them for the march back to the village. At the command, 'attention,' their heels clicked, their heads went back, their chins up and their right hands were pasted rigidly against their right trouser leg. "At the command 'march' all of them started off, punctuating their first step with the first word of their marching song. It was not any sickly chorus either. There was plenty of beef and lung power behind every note. My men lined up opposite were not missing a bit of it. Most of them seemed to know what was expected when I said: "'On the command of "march," the company will begin to sing, keeping step with the song. The first sergeant will announce the song.' "My first sergeant responded without a change of colour as if the command to sing had been an old regulation. I knew that he was puzzled, but he did it well. The name of the song chosen was passed down the line from man to man. "When I gave the command to march, the company, almost half of them new recruits, wheeled in squads of fours, and started off down the road singing, 'Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here.' There were some who were kind of weak on the effort, but there was a noticeable crescendo when the sergeant passed the word down the squad that the company would be kept marching until everybody had joined in the singing. "We swung into camp that night with every voice raising lustily on 'One Grasshopper Hopped Right Over Another Grasshopper's Back,' and after dinner the billets just sprouted melody, everything from ragtime to Christmas carols and baby lullabies." One noticeable characteristic about our soldiers during that training period before they had come in contact with the enemy, was a total absence of violent antipathy toward all persons and things Teutonic. On the march the men then sang "We'll Hang the Damned Old Kaiser to a Sour Apple Tree," but at that time I never heard any parodies on the "Gott Straffe Germany" theme. Our soldiers were of so many different nationalistic extractions and they had been thrown together for so short a time, that as yet no especial hatred of the enemy had developed. An illustration of this very subject and also the manner in which our boys got along with the civilian populations of the towns they occupied came to my notice.