Riding from London to Glasgow one afternoon, I became acquainted with a captain of the Black Watch. He was returning from Mesopotamia. For two years and six months he had been in service without a "leave." He was counting the miles to Dundee, and his eyes had the light of the home fires burning in them. We had talked about many things. He had told me of the death of General Maude, of the capture of Bagdad, and had given me what he believed to be the reasons for General Townshend's defeat. Finally I said, "Do you use the gas out there?" and he replied: "No; we have it ready, but we have never used it. _The Turks are Christians._ They don't use it." His answer gives more clearly than any argument I have ever listened to the statement of the difference between the spirit and programme of the Central Powers and the spirit and programme of the Allies. Gas was "made in Germany"; Autocracy and Absolutism are its parents. Only a stern military necessity has finally forced it as a weapon into the hands of Democracy. Military _necessity_, I say, for not to meet gas with gas would be like opposing rapid-fire guns with spears. The "culture" that ravished Louvain, and that left on the cities of northern France the scars of rapine and murder that will never out, has made the air a poison breath. CHAPTER IX "_THEY SHALL NOT PASS_" GLIMPSES OF THE SPIRIT OF THE TRENCHES We were seated together at a Liberty-Loan dinner in Buffalo. He was in the British uniform and "wore" a cane, not a dress cane, but a heavy stick that took the place of a crutch. A naturalized American citizen, he enlisted first in an Irish regiment. After recovering from a serious wound he was discharged, but a few weeks in New York left him a restless man with eyes turning ever toward the sea. On the thirtieth of November, 1916, he re-enlisted, this time with a Canadian regiment in Toronto. Again he was "shot to pieces." Now he hobbles about with the same nervous eagerness that forced him away from home the second time. Another honorable discharge has not satisfied him, and he said to me, "I hope I get over this so that I can re-enlist, this time under the Stars and Stripes." No _man_ who has been "over there" is ever again satisfied while water remains between him and the front. Not that he forms an appetite for war; he hates war. But so long as the fighters fight he will be in the valley of discontent when he is not on the field of action. In England and in Scotland I found scores of men pining for France. They had been eager to get back to "Blighty." With straining eyes they had watched for her shores through the mists of the morning as the hospital ship found the channel of the home port, but now they begged for a chance to get back. Lieutenant-Colonel Cote, on his way to rejoin in Italy his command which he had left on the Somme when a bullet through his shoulder and back laid him low, said to me: