It has been my privilege to have seen a good deal of the Guards in this war. You would scarcely recognize in these battle-stained warriors the spruce Guardsmen of St. James’s and the Park. The first Guardsmen I met in this war were a battalion of Irish Guards and a battalion of the Coldstreams on an evening in May, as they were marching down a road near Chocques towards the firing-line. Their creased caps and stained khaki, their dull green web equipment and short brown rifles, made them look at the first superficial glance like any other Regular troops. But something about their stride, the way they bore themselves, their alignment (though they were marching easy), made me look again. That magnificent physique, that brave poise of the head, that clear, cool look of the eye--that could only be of the Guards! They had come a long way. It was a close, warm evening, and the roads were a smother of choking dust. The Guards wore their caps pushed back off their foreheads, and their tunics unbuttoned at the neck, showing a patch of white skin where the deep tan of their faces and necks ended. The perspiration poured off them in streams. It traced little channels in the dust that lay thick on their sunburnt cheeks. Every now and then a man, with a grunt, would wipe the sweat from his eyes, and in the same motion administer that little hoist to his pack that is peculiar to the British soldier marching with a full load. Many a time, on German manœuvres, I have passed a regiment on the march, like these Guardsmen, in the stifling dust of a summer day. I have been all but choked by the sour odour which the breeze has wafted over from the marching men, and have been only too glad to follow the advice of the old hands to put the wind between them and me. But these British Guardsmen, grimy and travel-stained though they were on the outside, were clean of body, and the air about them was pure. Looking at them closer, I saw that under the dust their haversacks were neatly packed and fastened, their uniform well-fitting and whole, their puttees beautifully tied. These things may seem trifles to you who will read this in the sheltered atmosphere of England, where one man in khaki with a gun seems as another. But they are the mark of a good battalion, and, noting them on that dusty French road, with the guns drumming faintly in the distance and an aeroplane droning aloft, I knew that the trenches for which those troops were bound would be well held.