The sons of mothers like these do not shirk their duty when called upon to fight for their country. I believe that if the whole truth were told, we should find that no one was more indignant at the protest supposed to have been initiated by the working classes of Barcelona than the reservists whose grievances were its ostensible object. Fresh from an exceptionally rough crossing, weak with sea-sickness, rusty in their drill after three years of home life, the reservists who sailed from Barcelona found themselves led straight from the ship on to the field of battle. This I had from a naval officer on the man-of-war that took them out. “If they had been veterans,” he said, “such a situation would have been trying to them, and they were only raw fellows who hardly remembered the words of command. And yet I tell you they behaved with such courage and [Illustration: A RESERVIST At THE FRONT. [To face page 208.] discipline that I felt proud to be among them. I was sorry and ashamed to see those sea-sick boys ordered into action, but now I am glad to remember what I saw my compatriots do that day.” The naval officer spoke of an incident in the early days of the war, before the foreign correspondents had reached the scene of action. But for some time the censors, both at the front and in Madrid, had made it impossible for the truth about the campaign to be told; and England, at any rate, was for several weeks allowed to remain under the impression that the Spanish rank and file were a cowardly lot, driven into action at the point of their officers’ swords. That impression was corrected as time went on, and it is, I believe, now generally admitted that the Spanish troops do not lack courage. In Spain the conscripts join at the age of eighteen, and serve three years with the colours, when they are drafted into the first reserve. But those who can afford it may buy exemption from service for 1,500 pesetas (say £60), and from this source the Government makes an income estimated in the Budget for 1909 at pesetas 12,800,000 (about £512,000). Naturally the well-to-do always buy themselves out, as do also a certain number of the more prosperous of the working classes in the industrial towns. Señor Maura’s Government, not long before they went out, suddenly made an order calling on all those who had already bought their exemption to pay another 500 pesetas or join the colours at once, a proceeding which, differing as it does in no respect from highway robbery, naturally caused a good deal of indignation. No one likes to be called on to pay a second time over for what he has already bought; and in the case of the workmen, who generally secure themselves against service by means of one of the numerous insurance companies formed _ad hoc_, the premiums they had already paid were of course thrown away, and few indeed of them could produce 500 pesetas at a moment’s notice.