Nine out of ten of the conscripts were equally sound. For they would have been volunteers if they could. The tenth was the problem; the more so because there was nothing to tell you which was the tenth and which were the nine. For all that you knew, any man who came out on a draft, from then on, might be the exception, the literal-minded Christian who thought it wicked to kill in a war; or an anti-nationalist zealot who thought us all equally fools, the Germans and us, to be out there pasturing lice, instead of busy at home taking the hide off the _bourgeois_; or one of those drift wisps of loveless critical mind, attached to no place or people more than another, and just as likely as not to think that the war was our fault and that we ought to be beaten. _Riant avenir!_ as a French sergeant said when, in an hour of ease, we were talking over the nature of man, and he told me, in illustration of its diversity, how a section of his had just been enriched with a draft of neurasthenic burglars. These vulgar considerations of military expediency never seemed to cross the outer rim of the consciousness of many worthies who were engaged at home in shooing the reluctant into the army. If a recalcitrant seemed to be lazy, spiritless, nerveless, if there was every sign of his making a specially worthless and troublesome consumer of rations in a trench, then a burning zeal to inflict this nuisance and danger on some unoffending platoon in France seemed to invade the ordinary military tribunal. Report said that the satisfaction of this impulse was called, by the possessed persons, "giving Haig the men," and sometimes, with a more pungent irony, "supporting our fellows in the trenches." _Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis._ Australia's fellows in the trenches were suffered to vote themselves out of the risk of getting any support of the kind. Australia is a democracy. Ours were not asked whether they wanted to see their trenches employed as a penal settlement to which middle-aged moralists in England might deport, among other persons, those whom they felt to be morally the least beautiful of their juniors. So nothing impeded the pious practice of "larning toads to be toads." For the shirker, the "kicker," the "lawyer," for all the types of undesirables that contribute most liberally to the wrinkled appearance of sergeants, those pious men had the nose of collectors. Wherever there was a spare fifty yards of British front to be held, they, if anyone, could find a man likely to go to sleep there on guard, or, in some cyclonic disturbance of spirit, to throw down his rifle and light out for the coast, across country.