Before this war I never discussed with Indian officers the policy of the Government of India in regard to the Army. They knew the position fairly well, but with an inborn good feeling they seldom ventured to do anything more than touch casually on what was notoriously the intense stinginess practised towards the soldiery. If any of those high dignitaries yclept Members of Council should read anything I write, they may perhaps feel a passing shame in the thought that whilst they themselves, to use a slang phrase, always “did themselves well,” soldiers of all ranks below at any rate that of Major-General were treated as outcasts in a financial point of view, at all and every large political or social gathering, at which the civilians lived in luxury, sometimes casting an eye of patronage on their military “brethren,” whilst the latter, who had perhaps been undergoing very severe training at manœuvres, and had only arrived in Durbar camps at the eleventh hour (in order to make a show in scarlet and gold for the glorification of the aforesaid civilians), were consigned to some outlying sandhills and told to shift for themselves: no water supply prepared, no wood at hand for fires, and no preparations for sanitation. Yes, I have in my mind some very vivid recollections of many such scenes, and they are recalled to me by the remembrance of incidents at Neuve Chapelle. On this occasion the fault lay not with India, but that it passed almost unnoticed in the Corps was, as I have said, because the members of that Corps had been bred in an atmosphere of civilian selfishness so abysmal that they failed to realise they were no longer in the shiny East, but were actually considered as good as their fellows, and would be so treated. During the fighting, 10th to 11th March, the Dehra Dun Brigade sustained over 570 casualties. General Jacob and Colonel Widdicombe, 1/9th Gurkhas, were given the C.B., and Major Boileau, 2/2nd Gurkhas, was promoted to Brevet Lieut.-Colonel. The attack on 11th March was to have been supported by the Jalandar Brigade, but, as already described, it could not be carried out, and the Jalandars in consequence remained out in the preparatory positions they had assumed for the advance, under a heavy shell and rifle fire. Brigade Headquarters here had no luck: three different tumbledown houses selected were shelled in turn, till at last four of the signalling section were wounded by one projectile which plumped into the room they were working in.