With regard to the composition of the new army it may be said that the standing of the men has altered materially since the outbreak of hostilities, though this is in keeping with the trend of thought and feeling that has been evident since the end of the South African campaign. Up to the end of the nineteenth century there still remained obscure provincial centres in which it was supposed that only wastrels would enlist, with a view to getting an easy means of livelihood; farther back, this conception of the Army was a very common one. It is hard to say at what period of British history such an idea gained currency, unless the employment of mercenaries previous to the time of the French Revolution may have given it birth. For, long before Waterloo, the British soldier gave ample proof of the stuff of which he is made, and there is not a battlefield of history from which there has not come some instance of self-denial or devotion to a comrade which attests among the ranks of the British Army the existence of the highest principles by which humanity is actuated. But, up to the end of the nineteenth century, civilians could not understand the Army. Kipling taught them a little, but Kipling’s soldiers are all hard drinkers with a tendency to the slaughter of aspirates, and various other linguistic eccentricities. As character studies, Kipling’s soldiers are masterly works, but they bear little relation to the soldier of to-day, who, even as an infantryman, is required to be an educated man in certain directions, since he lives in a welter of wind gauges and trajectory, decimal points and mathematical calculations with regard to the accomplishment of his duties. The public as a whole has been waking up to these facts slowly--very slowly--but it has taken the world-catastrophe of a general European war to shake the public entirely from its apathy, and cause it to realise that the Army is an agglomeration of men in the highest sense of that little three-lettered word. There is to-day among all ranks and classes a realisation of the good that is, and always has been in the Army; there is a new interest in soldiers, in military movements, and in all that pertains to the theory and practice of war, and this augurs well for the future of members of the new army, both on duty and among their friends. Counting from the day that the nation wakened to the good that is in the Army, and the possibility of soldiers being at root like other men, military uniform has become a matter for pride to its wearer, and respect from those who from any cause are unable to assume the uniform. As this war has knit together motherland and colonies, so, by means of this war, the soldier has come to his own. The new army is not a thing apart from the nation: it is the nation.