Englishmen travel but little in their own country. I am no exception to the rule, though I can plead in excuse a long period of service abroad as a newspaper correspondent. But a morning spent among the troops of the great army which has sprung from our little Expeditionary Force is equivalent to a six weeks’ tour of the British Isles. Going from regiment to regiment, you pass from county to county, with its characteristic speech, its colouring, its fetishes, its customs. At the end of my first day with the army, as long ago as last March, when reinforcements came very slowly, and a Territorial Division was a thing to take guests to see, “to write home about,” as the saying goes (though in this case the Censor would probably intervene), I felt that I had seen the microcosm of Britain, this Empire so vast, so widespread, so heterogeneous, that its essence has never been distilled before. One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a battalion has been marching past me on the road, and tried to guess, often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the regiment from the men’s accents or from their tricks of speech. Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom, differs. I spent a most fascinating half-hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys, and newsboys they were, or of the same class, van-boys and the like. I visited the Cameron Highlanders--what was left of their Territorial battalion--after the second battle of Ypres, and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them. How many poachers of the red deer of Sherwood or the New Forest were there not at Agincourt? Leaving the red tartan of the Camerons and getting back to the trews, I remember an afternoon spent with the shattered remnants of the Scottish Rifles, about 150 men all told led out of action at Neuve Chapelle by a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. The Cameronians, which is the official title of the regiment, recruit in Lanarkshire and Aberdeenshire, and their speech was, I presume, the speech of those parts, for it was an accent--a Scottish accent--different from any other I had heard from the other Scotsmen out here.