the German over two hundred thousand.

Turning to the table, Colonel Fitzgerald picked up a sheet of paper
covered with figures.

"It is interesting," he said, "to compare the disease and battle
mortality percentages of this war with the percentages in other wars;
to see, considering the frightful weather and the trenches, how little
disease there has been among our troops. Compare the figures with the
Boer War, for instance. And even then our percentage has been somewhat
brought up by the Indian troops."

"Have many of them been ill?"

"They have felt the weather," he replied; "not the cold so much as the
steady rain. And those regiments of English that have been serving in
India have felt the change. They particularly have suffered from
frostbitten feet."

I knew that. More than once I had seen men being taken back from the
British lines, their faces twisted with pain, their feet great masses
of cotton and bandages which they guarded tenderly, lest a chance blow
add to their agony. Even the English system of allowing the men to rub
themselves with lard and oil from the waist down before going into
flooded trenches has not prevented the tortures of frostbite.

It was time to go and the motor was waiting. We set off in a driving
sleet that covered the windows of the car and made motoring even more
than ordinarily precarious. But the roads here were better than those
nearer the coast; wider, too, and not so crowded. To Ham, where the
Indian regiment I was to visit had been retired for rest, was almost
twenty miles. "Ham!" I said. "What a place to send Mohammedans to!"

In his long dispatch of February seventeenth Sir John French said of
the Indian troops:

"The Indian troops have fought with the utmost steadfastness and
gallantry whenever they have been called upon."

This is the answer to many varying statements as to the efficacy of
the assistance furnished by her Indian subjects to the British Empire
at this time. For Sir John French is a soldier, not a diplomat. No
question of the union of the Empire influences his reports. The
Indians have been valuable, or he would not say so. He is chary of
praise, is the Field Marshal of the British Army.

But there is another answer--that everywhere along the British front
one sees the Ghurkas, slant-eyed and Mongolian, with their
broad-brimmed, khaki-coloured hats, filling posts of responsibility.
They are little men, smaller than the Sikhs, rather reminisc