Yet the army which in the fulness of time Sir John French has been called upon to command is no longer the army of South Africa, a small, highly trained band of professional soldiers whom the Germans, on first meeting with them at Mons, dubbed in despair “an army of non-commissioned officers.” Since the days of the Civil War it is the first national army that England has ever had, and the England that has put it in the field is the greater England of the twentieth century, the British Empire, whose pioneers sprang from that selfsame doughty stock that did not fear to lay hands on the Lord’s Anointed if thereby liberty might live. The army has flung wide its portals to the civilian. All barriers of caste or wealth are broken down. The officer is no longer a member of a small military oligarchy, nor the soldier the tough old professional fighter of whom Kipling delighted to write. Mulvaney, Learoyd, and Ortheris have not vanished from the army. But they have vanished as average types. If they had escaped the destiny of so many of the magnificent fighters of our original Expeditionary Force, which was the quintessence of our standing army--six feet of earth in Flanders or a long visit to Germany--the three friends of Kipling’s tales would have passed out of their former sphere of action. The incorrigible Mulvaney, maybe, might yet be a sergeant, the backbone of his platoon, putting the new-comers, officers and men alike, up to all the dodges of the trenches. But the other two would surely be officers, with suspiciously new Sam Browne belts, a little uncertain of their social position, but treated with all the more deference for that by their fellow-officers. Socially it is a topsy-turvy army. Learoyd is brigade machine-gun officer with the Military Cross, and has already learned the proper degree of nonchalance in returning the salutes of men who, in civilian life, maybe, themselves were wont to command, who perhaps even shared in that incomprehensible English prejudice against the military which refused the red-coat a seat in the stalls of a London theatre or a drink in the saloon bar of a public-house. “When I went to see the old people in Yorkshire in my uniform for the first time,” a fine old soldier of my acquaintance, a sergeant of the Coldstreams with twenty-two years’ service, told me once, “my father said: ‘I never thought boy of mine would disgrace the family by going for a soldier. Get out of here, and never darken my doors again until you have taken that red coat off!’”