ell--was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously
interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature
in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly
awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier--boys. They made sudden
jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men
standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed
bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging
sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate
things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the
bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy
sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing
to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then
kicked the sack.

"That's what I like to see," said an officer. "There's a fine
fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Germans before he's
done."

Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He
curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack
to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes
bulge out of their heads, fired them with blood-lust, stoked up hatred
of Germans--all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of
latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories--one, famous in
the army, called "Where's 'Arry?"

It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of
Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood
his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, "Where's
'Arry?... 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet."

'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's work, but he was called
up and given his man to kill. And after that 'Arry was like a man-eating
tiger in his desire for German blood.

He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. "You may meet a
German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten children.'... Kill him! He might
have ten more."

At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to
human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see
every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of
death--machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later
on, tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the
British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived
longest w