We saw a squad of ineligibles drilling, boys under military age who had run away from home to get into the Big Game. Their parents had informed the authorities of their ineligibility, and the authorities had refused to enroll them. The boys had refused to go back home, and the arrangement is that they are to remain here and drill till they are old enough to fight. Some of them are as much as three years shy of the limit. The drill is made as entertaining as possible. The instructor uses a variation of our “Simon says: ‘Thumbs up’.” “O’Grady” sits in for Simon. For example, the instructor says: “O’Grady says: ‘Right dress.’ Left dress.” The youth who “left dresses” without O’Grady’s say-so is sent to the awkward squad in disgrace. Out of a bunch of approximately two hundred only two went through the drill perfectly. The other one hundred and ninety-eight underestimated the importance of O’Grady and sheepishly stepped out of line. The two perfectos looked as pleased as peacocks. We saw a bayonet drill with a tutor as vivacious and linguistically original as a football coach, and were then taken to the bomb-throwing school. The tutor here was as deserving of sympathy as a Belgian. A bomb explodes five seconds after you press the button. Many of the pupils press the button, then get scared, drop the bomb and run. The instructor has to pick up the bomb and throw it away before it explodes and messes up his anatomy. And there’s no time to stop and figure in what direction you’re going to throw. The Maoris were our next entertainers. The Maoris are colored gemmen from New Zealand. They were being taught how to capture a trench. Before they left their own dugout they sang a battle hymn that would make an American dance and scare a German to death. They went through their maneuvers with an incredible amount of pep and acted as if they could hardly wait to get into real action against the boche. Personally, I would have conscientious objections to fighting a Maori. Then we were shown a gas-mask dress rehearsal. A British gas mask has a sweet scent, like a hospital. You can live in one, they say, for twenty-four hours, no matter what sort of poison the lovely Huns are spraying at you. We all tried them on and remarked on their efficacy, though we knew nothing about it. We had lunch and were told we might make a tour of inspection of the hospitals in which the wounded lay. I balked at this and, instead, called on a Neenah, Wisconsin, doctor from whose knee had been extracted a sizable piece of shrapnel, the gift of last Sunday’s bomb dropper. This doctor has been over but three weeks, and the ship that brought him came within a yard of stopping a torpedo. Neither war nor Wisconsin has any terrors left for him. To-morrow we are to be taken right up to the front, dressed in helmets, gas masks, and everything. _Saturday, September 8. With the British._