I was one of about thirty instructors at the Havre ‘Bull Ring,’ where newly-arrived drafts were sent for technical instruction before going up the line. Most of my colleagues were specialists in musketry, machine-gun, gas, or bombs. I had no specialist training, only general experience. I was put on instructional work in trench relief and trench discipline in a model set of trenches. My principal other business was arms-drill. One day it rained, and the commandant of the Bull Ring suddenly ordered me to lecture in the big concert hall. ‘There are three thousand men there waiting for you, and you’re the only available officer with a loud enough voice to make himself heard.’ They were Canadians, so instead of giving my usual semi-facetious lecture on ‘How to be happy though in the trenches,’ I paid them the compliment of telling them the story of Loos, and what a balls-up it was, and why it was a balls-up. It was the only audience that I ever held for an hour with real attention. I expected the commandant to be furious with me because the principal object of the Bull Ring was to inculcate the offensive spirit, but he took it well and I had several more concert-hall lectures put on me after this. In the instructors’ mess the chief subjects of conversation besides local and technical talk were _morale_, the reliability of various divisions in battle, the value of different training methods, and war-morality, with particular reference to atrocities. We talked more freely there than would have been possible either in England or in the trenches. We decided that about a third of the troops in the British Expeditionary Force were dependable on all occasions; these were the divisions that were always called on for the most important tasks. About a third were variable, that is, where a division contained one or two bad battalions, but could be more or less trusted. The remainder were more or less untrustworthy; being put in positions of comparative safety they had about a quarter of the casualties that the best divisions had. It was a matter of pride to belong to one of the recognized best divisions—the Seventh, the Twenty-ninth, Guards’, First Canadian, for instance. They were not pampered when in reserve as the German storm-troops were, but promotion, leave, and the chance of a wound came quicker in them. The mess agreed that the most dependable British troops were the Midland county regiments, industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire troops, and the Londoners. The Ulsterman, Lowland Scots and Northern English were pretty good. The Catholic Irish and the Highland Scots were not considered so good—they took unnecessary risks in trenches and had unnecessary casualties, and in battle, though they usually made their objective, they too often lost it in the counter-attack; without officers they were no good. English southern county regiments varied from good to very bad. All overseas troops were good.