One leaf that had gone pretty yellow by now was the hope of perfect victory--swift, unsoured, unruinous, knightly: St. George's over the dragon, David's over Goliath. Some people at home seem to be still clinging hard to that first pretty vision of us as a gifted, lithe, wise little Jack fighting down an unwieldy, dastardly giant. But troops in the field become realists. Ours had seen their side visibly swelling for more than two years, till Jack had become a heavier weight than the giant and yet could not finish him off. We knew that our allies and we outnumbered the Germans and theirs. We knew we were just as well armed. We had seen Germans advancing under our fire and made no mistake about what they were worth. Our first vision of victory had gone the way of its frail sister dream of a perfect Allied comradeship. French soldiers sneered at British now, and British at French. Both had the same derisive note in the voice when they named the "Brav' Belges." Canadians and Australians had almost ceased to take the pains to break it to us gently that they were the "storm troops," the men who had to be sent for to do the tough jobs; that, out of all us sorry home troops, only the Guards Division, two kilted divisions and three English ones could be said to know how to fight. "The English let us down again"; "The Tommies gave us a bad flank, as usual"--these were the stirring things you would hear if you called upon an Australian division a few hours after a battle in which the lion had fought by the side of his whelps. Chilly, autumnal things; while you listened, the war was apparelled no longer in the celestial light of its spring. An old Regular colonel, a man who had done all his work upon the Staff, said, at the time, that "the war was settling down to peace conditions." He meant no bitter epigram. He was indeed unfeignedly glad. The war was ceasing to be, like a fire or shipwreck, a leveller of ranks which, he felt, ought not to be levelled. Those whom God had put asunder it was less recklessly joining together. The first wild generosities were cooling off. Not many peers and heirs-apparent to great wealth were becoming hospital orderlies now. Since the first earthquake and tidal wave the disturbed social waters had pretty well found their old seemly levels again; under conscription the sons of the poor were now making privates; the sons of the well-to-do were making officers; sanity was returning. The Regular had faced and disarmed the invading hordes of 1914. No small feat of audacity, either. Think what the shock must have been--what it would be for any profession, just at the golden prime of rich opportunity and searching test, to be overrun of a sudden by hosts of keen amateurs, many of them quick-witted, possibly critical, some of them the best brains of the country, most of them vulgarly void of the old professional habits of mind, almost indecently ready to use new and outlandish means to the new ends of to-day.