I suppose I still retain my civilian mind, for I cannot treat men as automatons; I have to interpret them with imagination. If one were to see only their externals, they would appear to be rough chaps, coarse in speech and habits, with a scowling attitude towards authority which only an iron discipline can keep subordinate. But when you view them with imagination, you see their enthusiasm for an ideal, which made them willing to give up their freedom and jeopardise their lives. For no one in our brigade needed to be in France; they all came as volunteers. You also see how from the very first the Army has failed to appreciate or make use of that enthusiasm; it prefers to treat men as people who, having signed away their bodies and lives, have to obey because they cannot escape. Yet despite the Army, the enthusiasm of the men survives. It creeps out in their letters to their mothers and wives, to whom they still are heroes. It even creeps out in their conversation, when one’s up front with them and keeping watch through the dreary hours of the night. They are coarse and rough it is true, for they are leading a coarse and a rough existence. Their only bedding is their blanket; they can never remove their clothes at night. Their chances for bathing come very rarely. They can carry only one change of underclothing as their rolls have to be of an exact and limited size. While in the line their quarters consist of holes burrowed under-ground; when out at rest they consist of broken down stables and barns, into which they are packed so closely that they can scarcely turn over without disturbing the men on either side. All the niceties and decencies of civilised life are denied them; war is a nasty affair and its nastiness cannot be avoided. No outcast of the city streets, drowsing under bridges and being harried by the police, leads a more comfortless existence. At the end of the journey, as a reward for their sufferings, are probable mutilation and death. Is it to be wondered that some of them get drunk to escape their misery whenever the chance presents itself, and that when drunk, they become bold to challenge the discipline which in action is their greatest protection? The crimes which they commit are crimes only in the Army—few of them would be even offences anywhere else. A man suffers the death penalty on active service for an error which in a civil court would cost him no more than a warning and a fine.