There is no need to string out many other modifications I proposed, and some I carried out, in the various Brigades. From this time till I left the Corps it was one continuous effort to keep things going. It was necessary to carry out tasks with the best grace we could muster, and at the same time try and satisfy the powers that were. I began this chapter with a remark that a student of psychology might find something of interest in it. Put yourself in the place of a sepoy, say of the 9th Bhopal Infantry. He had been brought up in a regiment composed of four classes of Indians: Sikhs, Rajputs, Brahmins, and Musalmans. He had been bred to the idea that his regiment was his military home and that it was the best in the army. He had understood that no man could be compulsorily transferred to another corps. He had firmly believed that our Army was not only the best trained but best equipped in the world, and he trusted his British officers as only Indians can trust them, _i.e._ absolutely, implicitly. Any recruit or trained soldier who joined his battalion he knew came there of his own free will, and he could not for a moment imagine that all sorts and conditions of men, out of all sorts of outlandish districts from Cape Comorin to Peshawar and from Quetta to Assam, talking different dialects and with entirely different ideals, might one fine morning arrive with shoulder badges denoting anything from police to Raj troops, and claim, not only acquaintance, but close comradeship with him as one of the 9th Bhopals. And yet, dumped down in the heart of Europe mid ice and snow, shot, mangled, and torn day after day, many of these things, of which he was so sanguine, were suddenly directly reversed. His old battalion and his officers still stood to him in the same relation, but he awoke to the truth that ours was by no means the best equipped Army for war; far from it. The exigencies of the time had shattered his dream. All kinds of strangers entered the ranks almost daily; all kinds of officers who did not understand him took command of his company. The promotion he had looked for in his battalion was going to outsiders; his own officers were being wiped out week by week, and his periods of leave home were _nil_. He was indeed a derelict! but he still stood in his trench, his rifle ready and his loyalty unimpaired. Only one belief had not been shattered, and that was, that his family would regularly receive the small dole that was his due, and that if he died this would still continue. In this knowledge lay his contentment. Is there not material here to ponder, for those who issued battle orders as if the whole Army was of Anglo-Saxon blood? Man is not cast in common mould; as iron is to unwrought gold, So is one man, ne’er mind his faith, distinct as love is far from hate, From all his fellow-men.