story, but swore it was true, because he had seen the head. We discussed the continuity of regimental _morale_. A captain in a line battalion of one of the Surrey regiments said: ‘It all depends on the reserve battalion at home.’ He had had a year’s service when the war broke out; the battalion, which had been good, had never recovered from the first battle of Ypres. He said: ‘What’s wrong with us is that we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad and so we get a constant re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the last two attacks that we made I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful that I couldn’t stand it. It’s the reason why I applied to be sent down here.’ This was not the usual loose talk that one heard at the base. He was a good fellow and he was speaking the truth. I was sorrier for Phillips—that was not his name—than for any other man I met in France. He deserved a better regiment. There was never any trouble with the Royal Welch like that. The boast of every good battalion in France was that it had never lost a trench; both our battalions made it. This boast had to be understood broadly; it meant never having been forced out of a trench by an enemy attack without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count, nor did retirement from a trench by order or when the battalion of the left or right had broken and left a flank in the air. And in the final stages of the war trenches could be honourably abandoned as being entirely obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters. We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in _morale_. ‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being and each movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement of one large creature.’ I used to have big bunches of Canadians to drill four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen came forward once and asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms and fixing and unfixing bayonets. They said they had come to France to fight and not to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the four in which I had served there had been three different kinds of troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at drill. These last fellows were, for some reason or other, much the best men in a show. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I told them that when they were better at fighting than the Guards’ Division they could perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.