Some fine day at the other end of the world some prancing pro-consul finds it necessary to smash one of the man-slaying machines that loom ominous on his borders, or some savage potentate makes an incursion into territory of a British colony, or some fierce outburst of Mahommedan fanaticism raises up a Mahdi in mid-Africa. In a moment Tommy Atkins is marched off to the troop-ship, and swept across the seas, heart-sick and sea-sick, and miserable exceedingly, to tight the Queen's enemies in foreign parts. When he arrives there he is bundled ashore, brigaded with other troops, marched to the front through the blistering glare of a tropical sun over poisonous marshes in which his comrades sicken and die, until at last he is drawn up in square to receive the charge of tens of thousands of ferocious savages. Far away from all who love him or care for him, foot-sore and travel weary, having eaten perhaps but a piece of dry bread in the last twenty-four hours, he must stand up and kill or be killed. Often he falls beneath the thrust of an assegai or the slashing broadsword of the charging enemy. Then, after the fight is over his comrades turn up the sod where he lies, bundle his poor bones into the shallow pit, and leave him without even a cross to mark his solitary grave. Perhaps he is fortunate and escapes. Yet Tommy goes uncomplainingly through all these hardships and privations, does not think himself a martyr, takes no fine airs about what he has done and suffered, and shrinks uncomplainingly into our Shelters and our Factories, only asking as a benediction from heaven that someone will give him an honest job of work to do. That is the fate of Tommy Atkins. If in our churches and chapels as much as one single individual were to bear and dare, for the benefit of his kind and the salvation of men, what a hundred thousand Tommy Atkins' bear uncomplainingly, taking it all as if it were in the day's work, for their rations and their shilling a day (with stoppages), think you we should not transform the whole face of the world? Yea, verily. We find but very little of such devotion; no, not in Israel. I look forward to making great use of these Army Reserve men. There are engineers amongst them; there are artillery men and infantry; there are cavalry men, who know what a horse needs to keep him in good health, and men of the transport department, for whom I shall find work enough to do in the transference of the multitudinous waste of London from our town Depots to the outlying Farm. This, however, is a digression, by the way.