Such episodes were reasonably few. The inveterate mercy that guards drunken sailors preserved from the worst disaster the cranks who had made a virtue of giving their country every bad soldier they could. And the abounding mercy of most courts-martial rendered few of the episodes fatal to individual conscripts. Nor, indeed, was the growth in their frequency after conscription wholly due to the more fantastic tricks played before high Heaven by some of the Falstaffs who dealt with the Mouldies, Shadows and Bull-calves. Conscription, in any case, must be dilution. You may get your water more quickly by throwing the filter away, but don't hope to keep the quality what it was. And the finer a New Army unit had been, to begin with, the swifter the autumnal change. Every first-rate battalion fighting in France or Belgium lost its whole original numbers over and over again. First, because in action it spared itself less than the poor ones; secondly, because the best divisions rightly got the hard jobs. Going out in the late autumn of 1915, a good battalion with normal luck might have nearly half its original volunteer strength left after the Battle of the Somme. Drafts of conscripts would fill up the gap, each draft with a listless or enigmatic one-tenth that volunteering had formerly kept at a distance. The Battle of Arras next spring might leave only twenty per cent of the first volunteers, and the autumn battles in Flanders would pretty well finish their business. Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together and set foot together in France and first marched through darkness and ruined villages towards the flaring fair-ground of the front. While a New Army battalion was still very young, and fully convinced that no crowd of men so good to be with had ever been brought together before, it used to be always saying how it would keep things up after the war. No such genial reunions had ever been held as these were to be. But now the few odd men that are left only write to each other at long intervals, feeling almost as if they were raising their voices in an empty church. One of them asks another has he any idea what the battalion was like after Oppy, or Bourlon Wood, or wherever their own knock-out came. Like any other battalion, no doubt--a mere G.C.M. of all conscript battalions; conscription filed down all special features and characters.