if
spirit is the wrong word, the flavour of the old army. The
professional soldier, save among field officers and the older
N.C.O.'s, is becoming rare. The citizen soldier has taken his place.

To say this is to repeat a commonplace. My remark was a commonplace,
stale with reiteration. But it is the nature of commonplaces and
truisms that they only become real to us when we discover them for
ourselves. I was familiar with the idea of the citizen soldier, with
the very phrase "an empire in arms," long before I went to France.
Yet my earliest experiences were a surprise to me. I had believed,
but I had not realised, that our ranks indeed contain "all sorts and
conditions of men."

I remember very well the first time that the truism began to assert
itself as a truth to me. I was in a soldiers' club, one of those
excellent places of refreshment and recreation run by societies and
individuals for the benefit of our men. It was an abominable evening.
Snow, that was half sleet, was driven across the camp by a strong
wind. Melting snow lay an inch deep on the ground. The club,
naturally under the circumstances, was crammed. Men sat at every
table, reading papers, writing letters, playing draughts and
dominoes. They stood about with cups of tea and cocoa in their hands.
They crowded round the fires. The steam of wet clothes and thick
clouds of tobacco smoke filled the air and dimmed the light from
lamps, feeble at best, which hung from ceiling and wall.

In one corner a man sat on a rickety chair. His back was turned to
the room. He faced the two walls of his corner. The position struck
me as odd until I noticed that he sat that way in order to get a
little light on the pages of the book he read. It was Oscar Wilde's
_De Profundis_. It was, I suppose, part of my business to make
friends of the men round me. I managed with some difficulty to get
into conversation with that man. He turned his chair half round and,
starting from Oscar Wilde, gave me his views on prison life. The
private soldier, coming under military discipline, is a prisoner, so
this man thought. He did not deny that it may be worth while to go to
prison for a good cause. But prison life is as galling and abominable
for a martyr as for a criminal.

There is a stir among the men. A lady, heavily cloaked and
waterproofed, made a slow progress through the room, staring round
her with curious eyes. She was a stranger, evidently a distinguished
stranger, for she