Even through those three weeks when they were retreating before the enemy, the whole spirit of the British troops was the spirit of men who are fighting to win. There is no hint of doubt or despondency in any of their letters home. They talk lightly of their hardest, most terrible experiences; they greet the unseen with a cheer; you hear of them cracking jokes, boyishly guying each other, singing songs as they march and as they lie in the trenches with shells bursting and shots screaming close over their heads. They carried out their retreats grudgingly, but without dismay, in the fixed confidence that their leaders knew what they were after, and that in due time they would find they had only been stooping to conquer. “They won’t let us have a fair smack at them,” says “Spratty,” of the Army Service Corps, in a letter home. “I have never seen such a sight before. God knows whose turn is next, but we shall win, don’t worry.” This is the watchword of them all: “Don’t worry--we shall win.” “Wine is offered us instead of water by the people,” wrote Private S. Browne, whilst his regiment was marching through France to the front; “but officers and men are refusing it. Some of the hardest drinkers in the regiment have signed the pledge for the war.” “Tommy goes into battle,” a French soldier told a reporter at Dieppe, “singing some song about Tip-Tip-Tip-Tipperary, and when he is hit he does not cry out. He just says ‘blast,’ and if the wound is a small one he asks the man next to him to tie a tourniquet round it and settles down to fighting again.” A corporal of the Black Watch explained to a hospital visitor, “It was a terrible bit of work. The Germans were as thick as Hielan’ heather, and by sheer weight forced us back step by step. But until the order came not a living man flinched. In the thick of the bursting shells we were singing Harry Lauder’s latest.” Trooper George Pritchard wrote to his mother from Netley Hospital the other day: “I got hit in the arm from a shell. Seven of our officers got killed last Thursday, but Captain Grenfell was saved at the same time as me. What do you think of the charge of the 9th? It is worth getting hit for.” “We are all in good heart, and ready for the next round whenever it may come,” writes Private J. Scott, from his place in the field; and “South Africa was child’s play to what we have been through,” writes Corporal Brogan, “but we are beginning to feel our feet now, and are equal to a lot more gruelling.”