What is true of the horses is equally true of the men. The physical standard has dropped. In 1914, unless one were physically perfect, it was impossible to get accepted. To-day both among the officers and in the ranks, one sees spectacled faces, narrow chests, stooping shoulders and weak legs. Boys and old gray-haired men go struggling up front through the mud to-day in France. Apparently, whatever his appearance, anyone is eligible to wear khaki who can tell a lie about how long he has been in the world. I would make a guess that fully a third of our drivers and gunners had not seen their eighteenth birthdays at the time when their military age was recorded as twenty; on the other hand, there is a goodly proportion who are supposed to be thirty and are well over forty. And then, besides those who are too old or too young, there are the crocks—men who, like the houses from the veterinary-hospitals, have been patched up again and again and, after short rests at comfortless places somewhere between the base and the Frontline, have once more been returned to active service to help push the Hun a little farther back before they themselves stumble into an open grave. These crocks are for the most part men who have never had the luck to be wounded; if they had once reached a hospital in England, they would never have been allowed to see the Front again. But the hospitals in France are compelled to be less merciful; their job is to repair the broken human mechanism and return it to the fighting-line so long as it has any usefulness. Our crocks are chiefly men who have been crushed by exposure and hardship. They suffer from debility, poor feet, rheumatism, running-ears, etc.; the ear-troubles are caused by the sharp concussion of the guns in the pits when they are fired. I suppose those in authority have been forced to the opinion that all men are of equal value when they are dead, and that it’s a waste of energy, when you’re collecting material for cannon-fodder, to be too picksome. In England, after the Hun drive of the spring had commenced, the magicians of the man-power boards were taking very much the same point of view, and arbitrarily improving the nation’s health by raising re-examined C III men to an A I category. There are few men now, except the very aged, who are not on paper sufficiently healthy to die for their country. This changed attitude is summed up in the treatment of wounded men. Whereas to have been severely wounded was formerly a just reason for honourable discharge, to-day we have men still fighting who have made the trip to Blighty five times on a stretcher. There are officers who have suffered amputations, who are still carrying on.