A man who hadn’t guts was shot at the back of the line by his comrades as a deserter. A man who had was shot up front as a white man with his face towards the enemy. There was no appeal from these alternatives; birth, talents, money could not disturb the sentence. There was only one standard by which our worth was estimated—-the measure of our sacrificial courage. Of course we were all inefficient. We had never dreamt of being soldiers till the deluge of brutality poured out of Germany and threatened to destroy the world. We were specialists in various small departments of human knowledge; our special knowledge, unless it was military, was no longer of service. That was the hard part of it—that many of us who had known the pride of being specialists, were now called upon to approve ourselves in an effort for which we were totally unfitted. Of all the qualities which we had cultivated so carefully the world asked for the one to which we had paid least attention—our courage. So the Captain laid down his brush, turned his canvases to the wall, joined as an artillery driver and went to grooming horses. When his training was ended and he was shot out to the Front, he learnt almost over-night the tremendous lesson that it’s the spirit that counts—the thing that a man is essentially inside himself and not the thing which his social advantages make him appear to other people. A man cannot camouflage under shell-fire; in the face of death his true worth becomes known to everybody. When war started, Judgment Day commenced in the world for every man who put on khaki. God estimated us in the front-line, and God’s eyes were the eyes of our fellows. I believe the Captain had expected that he would prove himself a coward—most of us expected that for ourselves. When he found that he could be fearless, the relief was so triumphant that he became possessed by an immense elation. He took the wildest chances and was always trying to outdo in heroism his own last bravest act. Promotion came rapidly; at the end of eight months he was a sergeant and before the year was out had gained his commission. He joined our brigade as an officer in September of 1916, when we were waiting on the high ground behind Albert, preparatory to being flung into the cauldron of the Somme offensive. He was treated with suspicion at first; no one expected much from a chap who had been a painter. The Colonel sniffed contemptuously when he reported at the tent which was brigade headquarters. “What were you before you became a soldier?” “A painter, sir.” “Of houses?” “No. Of landscapes and portraits.” To a hustler who has flung railroads across continents, outwitting nature and abbreviating time, to have been a painter seemed a sorry occupation—an occupation which indicated long hair, innumerable cigarettes, artists’ models and silken ways of life. The Colonel himself had been in the North-West Mounted Police and had lived furiously, tracking outlaws and rounding up Indians.