The Welsh ranks had been made up first with reservists of the later categories, then with re-enlisted men, then with Special Reservists of pre-war enlistment, then with 1914 recruits of three or four months’ training; but each class had in turn been exhausted. Now nothing was left to send but recruits of the spring 1915 class, and various sweepings and scourings. The First Battalion had, meanwhile, had the same heavy losses. In Cardiff they advertised: ‘Enlist at the depot and get to France quick.’ The recruits were principally men either over-age or under-age—a repetition of regimental history—or men who had some slight physical disability which prevented them from enlisting in regiments more particular than the Welsh. I still have the roll of my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are misleading. When they enlisted all the over-age men had put themselves in the late thirties and all the under-age men had called themselves eighteen. But once in France the over-age men did not mind adding on a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age as forty or over and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was even older than these. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry course at the depot?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man and I had only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist but they told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier when I was in Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night in a dug-out opposite mine talking about the different seams of coals in Wales and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical comments. It was one of the most informative conversations I ever heard.