sung to dourly wailful tunes, at the seasons of stress when Scotsmen and Irishmen screwed themselves up to the sticking-point with their Tyrtæan anti-English ballads, when Frenchmen would soulfully hymn Glory and Love, and when Germans, if the ear did not deceive, were calling out the whole Landwehr and Landsturm of the straight patriotic lyre. Williams, the third of the Agincourt privates, lives too. He lives with a vengeance. You will remember that he was an anti-ranter, anti-canter and anti-gusher, like Bates. But he ran a special line of his own. He was not simply "fed up"--as he would say now--with tall talk about the just cause and brothers-in-arms and the moral beauty of dying in battle. He was suspicious, besides. He darkly fancied that those who emitted the stuff must have some crooked game on. "That's more than we know" was his stopper for all stock heroics. He would take none of his betters on trust, neither High Command nor Government nor Church--only one company officer whom he knew for himself--"a good old commander and a most kind gentleman." This one small plot of dry ground was reclaimed from the broad sea of Williams' scepticism. II If this Doubting Thomas abounded at Agincourt how could he not abound at, say, the third Battle of Ypres? At Agincourt our whole army was just small enough to have comradeship all the way through it--not the figure-of-speech used by the orators, but the thing that soldiers know. Comradeship in a battalion will come of itself; it may be grown, with some effort, in a brigade; in good divisions it has flickered into life for a while during a war; army corps know it not, though their headquarters staffs may dine together at times. At Agincourt the whole of our force was an infantry brigade and a half. It all lay handy in one bivouac. Generals led advancing troops as second-lieutenants do now. The commander-in-chief could go round the lines of a night and talk to the men; if he should speak to them about "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers," he would not be projecting gas.