The courage, the cheerfulness, the dauntless spirit of them is the more striking when you remember that the vast majority of our soldiers have never been in battle until now. Russia has many veterans from her war with Japan; France has a few who fought the Prussian enemy in 1870; we have some from the Boer war; but fully three parts of our troops, like all the heroic Belgians, have had their baptism of fire in the present gigantic conflict. And it is curiously interesting to read in several of the letters the frank confession of their writers’ feelings when they came face to face for the first time with the menace of death in action. One such note, published in various papers, was from Alfred Bishop, a sailor who took part in the famous North Sea engagement of August last. His ship’s mascot is a black cat, and: “Our dear little black kitten sat under our foremost gun,” he writes, “during the whole battle, and was not frightened at all, only when we first started firing. But afterwards she sat and licked herself.... Before we started fighting we were all very nervous, but after we joined in we were all happy and most of us laughing till it was finished. Then we all sobbed and cried. Even if I never come back don’t think I died a painful death. Everything yesterday was quick as lightning.” A wounded English gunner telling of how he went into action near Mons owns to the same touch of nervousness in the first few minutes: “What does it feel like to be under fire? Well, the first shot makes you a bit shaky. It’s a surprise packet. You have to wait and keep on moving till you get a chance.” But as soon as the chance came, his shakiness went, and his one desire in hospital was “to get back to the front as soon as the doctor says I’m fit to man a gun. I don’t want to stop here.” “I have received my baptism of fire,” writes a young Frenchman at the front to his parents in Paris. “I heard the bullets whistling at my ears, and saw my poor comrades fall around me. The first minutes are dreadful. They are the worst. You feel wild. You hesitate; you don’t know what to do. Then, after a time, you feel quite at your ease in this atmosphere of lead.”