The excitable Parisians admired the way Mr. Thomas Atkins took everything as a matter of course and accommodated himself to circumstances. They shrieked with admiration when they saw two Highlanders with arms wounded dance a reel on a railway platform. In another part of France a train full of British soldiers arrived. A Frenchman said to some of them, "Bravo! You have done splendid work, I hope that you will soon get home." "Home, sir?" replied a gunner, "why we're just getting warmed up for work. It took us a few weeks to get used to it, but now we love it and are as fit as fiddles." "What is it like at the front?" a private of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was asked in a hospital in England. "Well, now it's hard to tell you that unless you've been there, but, faith, I'll make a good try, just to oblige you. It's very little different from what goes on at home. The day's made up of grousing and fighting, except that instead of fighting among ourselves it's the Germans we fight. Maybe the grousing's a bit different, too, from what it is in peace time. The Englishmen swear most when the meals aren't all they might be, but the Scotch and the Irish are mostly angered because the German devils won't come out and fight so's we can give them the cold iron. The English don't seem to mind that so much, so long as they have full stomachs and can keep firing away at the Germans with the big guns and the rifles." Corporal Graham Hodson, Royal Engineers, wrote to his parents: "I am feeling awfully well, and am enjoying myself no end. Oh, it's a great life!" So little downhearted were his men that an officer, after observing them, said admiringly, "You are a lively lot of beggars. You don't seem to realise that we are at war." One man, however, thought it well to give the inexperienced a little warning. He was a wounded soldier who was travelling in a train. At a point on the line where it ran parallel with the road he saw a brand new Territorial battalion marching up to the front, He stuck his bandaged head out of the door and yelled, "Are you dahn'earted?" The Terriers, from the colonel to the smallest drummer, shouted, "No-o-oh!" The wounded man replied, "Well, you ---- soon will be when you get in those trenches." When they were being heavily shelled a regiment shouted to their comrades in some distant trenches, "Are we downhearted?" A pause ensued, then a bloody spectre raised himself from a trench, shouted "No!" with a last breath and fell back dead. It is a curious fact in the Army that the harder the conditions the more cheerful the men are. When everything is all right there is grumbling, but as soon as things are bad they all get as happy as sand-boys. The "wild pulsation of strife" seems to be a "rapture" to some, and that soldier no doubt meant what he said when he wrote to his parents, "You can't believe how happy I was fighting the Germans. I felt as if I were in a football match."