Take the worse experience of the 5th Battalion on July 10th, when they first took over these newly captured trenches. All day long the incessant German batteries poured their hail and thunder on the line, and not a single quiet hour was given for cleaning, clearing or repairing. The casualties mounted fast. Twenty-seven men were killed, and the list of wounded and missing included one Officer and 129 other ranks. Next day the following telegram was received: ‘Army Commander desires to commend prompt action of troops 49th Division when attacked last night’; and the severity of the ordeal may be judged from the records of Lance-Corporals J. Yates and A. Calvert and of Pte. A. Gwynette, who were all awarded the D.C.M.: Yates, ‘for attending with great gallantry, on the 10th July, under heavy fire and in full view of the German lines, to two wounded men who were cut off from the rest of the Platoon’; Calvert, ‘for assisting the Platoon Commander in steadying the men and keeping up their spirits, on the 10th July, when many other N.C.O.’s had been killed or wounded’; and Gwynette, ‘for attending to about twenty wounded men on the 10th July, during the heaviest part of the bombardment, and for keeping up the spirits of the men by his general bearing and conduct under heavy fire.’ These, surely, are the tests that tell. In these typical examples, selected almost at random from the day’s work, we see in the making, as it were, that ‘sense of mastery over the enemy,’ which the Chairman and Secretary of the Association had observed on their visit to the front, and which was ultimately to dictate the terms of the Peace of Paris. On the East bank of the Yser Canal in the Summer of 1915, in stinking trenches filled with human wreckage, and exposed to a pitiless bombardment, the prospect of ‘ease after war’ might well seem too remote for realization. It might seem, too, an idle thing, and below the fever-point of warfare, to respond in such dismal surroundings and with so dull a hope of martial glory to the constant, recurrent calls on a courage screwed to the sticking-place or a sense of duty as its own reward. Yet, somehow, in justice to the heroic dead, and to those who earned as well as to those who received decorations, the perception must be aroused that the war was won in the last resort by the private soldier, whether Regular, Territorial or New Army. In our Military Headquarters calculus he is not _Kanonenfutter_, food for guns: he is always, potentially, the wearer of a medal for the distinguished conduct, which he always seizes an opportunity to display; and a period of comparative inactivity may provide more memorable opportunities of this kind than the stress and press of a big battle, precisely because the velocity of effort is measured by the daily round of marching from billets to trenches or of carrying out a normal patrol.