ee that difference in race does not
mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently
expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved
than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for
property and the rights of the population.

And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we
hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a
mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive
instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools
within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army
in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from
the battle-line.

"Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass," wrote a Sikh
soldier home, "and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land."

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the
brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey,
bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war.
Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for
drawing water. They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge
and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was
homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers
or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is
the secret of the American's nervous energy. It seemed to me that it
was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the
year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us
came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on
foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true
equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of
weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the
reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed
by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his
uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French
barns.

You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay
into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders
winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to
fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans
appeared occasional white faces. These were the