Through all these battles our men were magnificent--not demi-gods, nor saints with a passion for martyrdom, nor heroes of melodrama facing death with breezy nonchalance while they read sweet letters from blue-eyed girls, but grim in attack and stubborn in defence, getting on with the job--a damned ugly job--as far as the spirit could pull the body and control the nerves. They were industrious as ants on this great muck-heap of the battlefield. Transport drivers, engineers, signallers, and pioneers laboured for victory as hard as infantry and gunners, and worked, for the most part, in evil places where there was always a chance of being torn to rags. The gunners, with their wheels sunk to the axles, served their batteries until they were haggard and worn, and they had little sleep and less comfort, and no hour of safety from infernal fire. They were wet from one week to another. They stood to the tags of their boots in mud. They had many of their guns smashed to spokes and splinters. They were lucky if lightly wounded. But their barrage-fire rolled ahead of the infantry at every attack and they shattered the enemy's divisions. The stretcher-bearers seemed to give no thought to their own lives in the rescue of the wounded; and down behind the lines--not always beyond range of gun-fire--doctors and hospital orderlies and nurses worked in the dressing-stations with the same dogged industry and courage as men who carried up duck-boards to the line, drove teams of pack-mules up tracks under fire, or unloaded shells from trains that went puffing to the edge of the battlefields. It was all part of the business of war. Wounded men who came back from battle were dealt with as so many cases of damaged goods, to be packed off speedily to make way for others. There was no time for sentiment--and no need of it. I used to go sometimes to an old mill-house on days of battle. During the Flanders fighting thousands of wounded men came to this place as a first stage on their journey to base hospitals. The lightly wounded used to sit in a long low tent beside the mill, round red-hot braziers, waiting in turn to have their wounds dressed. These crowds of men were of many battalions and of all types of English, Scottish, and Irish troops, with smaller bodies of Australians, New-Zealanders, Canadians, South-Africans, Newfoundlanders. They were clotted with mud and blood, and numb and stiff until the warmth of the braziers unfroze them. They sat silent as a rule, with their steel hats tilted forward, but there was hardly a groan from them, and never a whimper, nor any curse against the fate that had hit them. If I questioned them they answered with a stark simplicity of truth about the things they had seen and done, with often a queer glint of humour--grim enough, God knows, but humour still--in their tale of escape from death. Always after a talk with them I came away with a deep belief that the courage, honesty, and humanity of these boys were a world higher than