he simply went to pieces. On our first bombing raid he turned and ran back into our own barbed wire, and when he was caught there acted like a madman. He was given another chance but flunked worse than ever. I don’t think he was a plain coward. There was merely something wrong with his nervous system. He just didn’t have the “viscera.” Now he is back of the lines, instructing, and will never be sent to the trenches again. We had an officer, also, who was a man of the greatest courage, so far as sticking where he belonged and keeping his men going ahead might be concerned, but every time he heard a big shell coming over he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting. I don’t know what makes men brave or cowardly in action, and I wouldn’t undertake to say which quality a man might show until I saw him in action, but I do know this: If a man isn’t frightened when he goes under fire, it’s because he lacks intelligence. He simply must be frightened if he has the ordinary human attributes. But if he has what we call physical courage he goes on with the rest of them. Then if he has extraordinary courage he may go on where the rest of them won’t go. I should say that the greatest fear the ordinary man has in going into action is the fear that he will show that he is afraid--not to his officers, or to the Germans, or to the folks back home, but to his mates; to the men with whom he has laughed and scoffed at danger. It’s the elbow-to-elbow influence that carries men up to face machine guns and gas. A heroic battalion may be made up of units of potential cowards. At the time when Macfarlane was given his stripes, I also was made a sergeant on account of the fact that I had been at school in the Virginia Military Institute. That is, I was an acting sergeant. It was explained to me that my appointment would have to be confirmed in England, and then reconfirmed after three months’ service in France. Under the regulations of the Canadian forces, a non-commissioned officer, after final confirmation in his grade, can be reduced to the ranks only by a general court-martial, though he can escape a court-martial, when confronted with charges, by reverting to the ranks at his own request.