ially civilian habits and traditions can achieve as soldiers. The
numbers of the 7th Manchesters were never fully up to strength after
April, 1915, and for many months at a time while in the East they fell
to vanishing point. Yet from the day in September, 1914, when the
original first-line Battalion sailed from Southampton for Port Sudan in
the "Grantully Castle," each successive draft was of the same mould. The
men came from the same neighbourhood, were of the same capacity, and had
been bred with the same ideas. Their devotion was founded on a sense of
duty. They were personally utterly remote from what is called
militarism, and saw little fascination in its pomp. The survivors are
now absorbed once more in the undramatic industry of Lancashire. There
is nothing to indicate to an observer that they have ever left it. The
last time you saw your tramway conductor may have been as a bomber in
"the western birdcage" on Cape Helles; your fellow passenger may have
last talked to you as your "runner," when you tramped along the
duckboards from Windy Corner to Givenchy. What such men did for England
will therefore illustrate for all time the potentialities of a
Territorial Force.

Captain Wilson's style of expression and cast of thought are, in my
view, true to type. He is the Lancashire man of action, who affects no
literary arts. These pages are bare of heroics. There is a soldierly
brevity in his account of even of the bravest exploit. There is also
plenty of quiet humour. The reader will search vainly for any "villain
of the piece." The "Hun" is to Captain Wilson, as to the normal British
officer, just a "Boche" and no more; to the rank and file he was simply
"Jerry." If you want adjectives, you will have to look for them in _John
Bull_ or listen to speeches in the House of Commons.

For all who were in authority over him, whether Corps Commanders or
Divisional Generals, Brigadiers or temporary Commanding Officers,
Captain Wilson has a good word. A reader unfamiliar with soldiers'
psychology might deduce that all his superior officers had been
invariably models of judgment and efficiency. He would possibly be quite
wrong; but it is most fitting that this book should be framed on such
lines, for they are the lines which our soldiers have never failed to
accept. The rough is taken with the smooth. If ever there has been
incompetence men have simply blamed the system and cursed the War
Office. If they happened to have been