The mention of the private with a rifle suggests my chief regret. The method I have followed, in treating divisions or brigades or, at the lowest, battalions as the units of action, almost obliterates the individual soldier from consideration. Divisions, brigades, and battalions are moved like pieces on a board, and Commanding Officers must regard each of them only as a certain quantity of force acting under the laws of time and space. Yet each of the so-called units is made up of living men--men of distinctive personality and incalculably varying nature. Men are the actual units in war as in the State, and I do not forget the “common soldiers.” I do not overlook either their natural failures or their astonishing performance. In various campaigns and in many countries I have shared their apprehensions, their hardships, their brief intervals of respite, and their laborious triumphs. They, like the rest of mankind, have always filled me with surprised admiration or poignant sympathy. Among the soldiers of many races, but especially among the natives of these islands, whom I could best understand, I have always found the fine qualities which distinguish the majority of hardworking people, all of whom live perpetually in perilous hardship. I have found a freedom from rhetoric and vanity, a simple-hearted acceptance of life “in the first intention,” taking life and death without much criticism as they come, and concealing kindliness and the longing for happiness under a veil of silence or protective irony. But a book of this kind has little place for the mention of them, and that is my regret. Like a general, I have been obliged to consider forces mainly in the mass, and must leave to readers the duty of remembering, as I never cease to remember, that all divisions and all platoons upon the Peninsula were composed of ordinary men like ourselves--individual personalities subject to the common sufferings of hunger, thirst, sickness, and pain; filled also with the common delight in life, the common horror of death, and the desire for peace and home. As in the case of general mankind, it was their endurance, their courage, self-sacrifice, and all that is implied in the ancient meanings of “virtue,” which excited my wonder.