Large drafts were now constantly being sent off to the First, Second, Ninth, and Tenth Battalions in France, and to the Eighth Battalion in Mesopotamia. There were few absentees among the men warned for the drafts. But it was noticeable that they were always more cheerful about going in the spring and summer when there was heavy fighting on than in the winter months when things were quiet. (The regiment kept up its spirit even in the last year of the war. Attwater told me that big drafts sent off in the critical weeks of the spring of 1918, when the Germans had broken through the Fifth Army, went down to the station singing and cheering enthusiastically. He said that they might have been the reservists that he and I had seen assembling at Wrexham on 12th August 1914, to rejoin the Second Battalion just before it sailed for France.) The colonel always made the same speech to the draft. The day that I rejoined the battalion from the Isle of Wight I went via Liverpool Exchange Station and the electric railway to Litherland. Litherland station was crowded with troops. I heard a familiar voice making a familiar speech; it was the colonel bidding Godspeed to a small draft of men who were rejoining the First Battalion. ‘... going cheerfully like British soldiers to fight the common foe ... some of you perhaps may fall.... Upholding the magnificent traditions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers....’ The draft cheered vigorously; rather too vigorously, I told myself. When he had finished I went over and greeted a few old friends: 79 Davies, 33 Williams, and the Davies who was nicknamed ‘Dym Bacon,’ which was Welsh for ‘there isn’t any bacon.’ (He had won the nickname in his recruit days. He was the son of a Welsh farmer and accustomed to good food and so he complained about his first morning’s breakfast, shouting out to the orderly-sergeant: ‘Do you call this a bloody breakfast, man? Dym bacon, dym sausages, dym herrings, dym bloody anything. Nothing but bloody bread and jaaam.’) There was another well-remembered First Battalion man—d.c.m. and rosette, Médaille Militaire, Military Medal, no stripe. ‘Lost them again, sergeant?’ I asked. He grinned: ‘Easy come, easy go, sir.’ Then the train came in and I put out my hand with ‘Good luck!’ ‘You’ll excuse us, sir,’ he said. The draft shouted with laughter and I saw why my hand had not been wrung, and also why the cheers had been so ironically vigorous. They were all in handcuffs. They had been detailed a fortnight before for a draft to Mesopotamia; but they wanted to go back to the First Battalion, so they overstayed their leave. The colonel, not understanding, put them into the guardroom to make sure of them for the next draft. So they were now going back in handcuffs under an escort of military police to the battalion of their choice. The colonel, as I have already said, had seen no active service himself; but the men bore him no ill-will for the handcuffs. He was a