e camp. Some of the days have been intensely hot, but the British
Tommy unfastens his coat and leaves his shirt open at the chest, and
with the sun bronzing his face to a deeper, richer tint, marches on,
singing a cockney ballad as though he were on the road to
Weybridge or Woking. They are young fellows, many of them--
beardless boys who have not yet been hard-bitten by a long
campaign and have not received their baptism of fire. Before they
have been many days in the fields of France they will not look so
fresh and smart. Those grey eyes of theirs will be haunted by the
memory of battlefields at night, when the stretcher-bearers are
searching for the wounded who lie among the dead. Not yet do these
boys know the real meaning of war. But they belong to the same
breed of men who a hundred years ago fought with Wellington in the
Peninsula. There is no possible need to doubt that they will maintain
the old traditions of their regiments and add new records to their
colours. Before this war is finished these soldiers of ours, who are
singing on their way, in dapper suits of khaki, will be all tattered and
torn, with straw tied round their feet, with stubby beards on their chins,
with the grime of gunpowder and dust and grease and mud and
blood upon their hands and faces. They will have lost the freshness
of their youth: but those who remain will have gained--can we doubt
it?--the reward of stubborn courage and unfailing valour."

17

Not many days after these words were written, I came upon a scene
which fulfilled them, too quickly. At a French junction there was a
shout of command in English, and I saw a body of men in khaki, with
Red Cross armlets, run across a platform to an incoming train from
the north, with stretchers and drinking bottles. A party of English
soldiers had arrived from a battle at a place called Mons. With French
passengers from another train, I was kept back by soldiers with fixed
bayonets, but through the hedge of steel I saw a number of
"Tommies" with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the
troop train. Some of them hung limp between their nurses. Their
faces, so fresh when I had first seen them on the way out, had
become grey and muddy, and were streaked with blood. Their khaki
uniforms were torn and cut. One poor boy moaned pitiably as they
carried him away on a stretcher. They were the first fruits of this
unnatural harvesting, lopped and maimed by a cruel reaper. I stared
at them with