Even through those three weeks when they were retreating before the enemy, the whole spirit of the British troops was the spirit of men who are fighting to win. There is no hint of doubt or despondency in any of their letters home. They talk lightly of their hardest, most terrible experiences; they greet the unseen with a cheer; you hear of them cracking jokes, boyishly guying each other, singing songs as they march and as they lie in the trenches with shells bursting and shots screaming close over their heads. They carried out their retreats grudgingly, but without dismay, in the fixed confidence that their leaders knew what they were after, and that in due time they would find they had only been stooping to conquer. “They won’t let us have a fair smack at them,” says “Spratty,” of the Army Service Corps, in a letter home. “I have never seen such a sight before. God knows whose turn is next, but we shall win, don’t worry.” This is the watchword of them all: “Don’t worry—we shall win.”

“Wine is offered us instead of water by the people,” wrote Private S. Browne, whilst his regiment was marching through France to the front; “but officers and men are refusing it. Some of the hardest drinkers in the regiment have signed the pledge for the war.”

“Tommy goes into battle,” a French soldier told a reporter at Dieppe, “singing some song about Tip-Tip-Tip-Tipperary, and when he is hit he does not cry out. He just says ‘blast,’ and if the wound is a small one he asks the man next to him to tie a tourniquet round it and settles down to fighting again.” A corporal of the Black Watch explained to a hospital visitor, “It was a terrible bit of work. The Germans were as thick as Hielan’ heather, and by sheer weight forced us back step by step. But until the order came not a living man flinched. In the thick of the bursting shells we were singing Harry Lauder’s latest.”

Trooper George Pritchard wrote to his mother from Netley Hospital the other day: “I got hit in the arm from a shell. Seven of our officers got killed last Thursday, but Captain Grenfell was saved at the same time as me. What do you think of the charge of the 9th? It is worth getting hit for.”

“We are all in good heart, and ready for the next round whenever it may come,” writes Private J. Scott, from his place in the field; and “South Africa was child’s play to what we have been through,” writes Corporal Brogan, “but we are beginning to feel our feet now, and are equal to a lot more gruelling.”

“We are all beat up after four days of the hardest soldiering you ever dreamt of,” Private Patrick McGlade says in a letter to his mother. “I am glad to say we accounted for our share of the Germans. We tried hard to get at them many a time, but they never would wait for us when they saw the bright bits of steel at the business end of our rifles. Some of them squeal like the pigs on killing day when they see the steel ready. Some of our finest lads are now sleeping their last sleep in Belgium, but, mother dear, you can take your son’s word for it that for every son of Ireland who will never come back there are at least three Germans who will never be heard of again. When we got here we sang ‘Paddies Evermore,’ and then we were off to chapel to pray for the souls of the lads that are gone.”

“Some of us feel very strongly about being sent home for scratches that will heal,” writes Corporal A. Hands. “Don’t believe half the stories about our hardships. I haven’t seen or heard of a man who made complaint of anything. You can’t expect a six-course dinner on active service, but we get plenty to fight on.”

Cases of personal pluck were so common that we soon ceased to take notice of them, a wounded driver in the Royal Artillery told an interviewer. “There was a man of the Buffs, who carried a wounded chum for over a mile under German fire, but if you suggested a Victoria Cross for that man he would punch your head, and as he is a regular devil when roused the men say as little as they can about it. He thinks he didn’t do anything out of the common, and doesn’t see why his name should be dragged into the papers over it. Another case I heard of was a corporal of the Fusilier Brigade—I don’t know his regiment—who held a company of Germans at bay for two hours by the old trick of firing at them from different points, and so making them think they had a crowd to face. He was getting on very well until a party of cavalry outflanked him, as you might say, and as they were right on top of him there was no kidding about his ‘strength,’ so he skedaddled, and the Germans took the position he had held so long. He got back to his mates all right, and they were glad to see him, for they had given him up for dead.”

“No regiment fought harder than we did, and no regiment has better officers, who went shoulder to shoulder with their men,” says a non-commissioned officer of the Buffs, writing from hospital, “but you can’t expect absolute impossibilities to be accomplished, no matter how brave the boys are, when you are fighting a force from twenty to thirty times as strong. If some of you at home who have spoken sneeringly of British officers could have seen how they handled their men and shirked nothing you would be ashamed of yourselves. We are all determined when fit again to return and get our own back.”

Everywhere you find that the one cry of the soldiers who are invalided home—they are impatient to be cured quickly and get back “to have another slap at them.” We know how our women here at home share that eager enthusiasm in this the most righteous war Britain has ever gone into; and isn’t there something that stirs you like the sound of a trumpet in such a passage as this from the letter a Scottish nun living in Belgium has written to her mother?

“I am glad England is aroused, and that the British lion is out with all his teeth showing. Here these little lions of Belgians are raging mad and doing glorious things.

“Tell father I am cheery, and feel sometimes far too warlike for a nun. That’s my Scottish blood. I hope to goodness the Highlanders, if they come, will march down another street on their way to the caserne, or I shall shout and yell and cheer them, and forget I mustn’t look out of the window.”

An extract from Sergeant T. Cahill’s letter to his friends at Bristol gives you a snap-shot of our women in the firing line, and of the fearless jollity and light-heartedness with which our Irish comrades meet the worst that their enemies can do:

“The Red Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways, are as good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not supposed to venture into the firing line at all, but they get there all the same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away,” and he goes on casually, “Mick Clancy is that droll with his larking and bamboozling the Germans that he makes us nearly split our sides laughing at him and his ways. Yesterday he got a stick and put a cap on it so that it peeped above the trenches just like a man, and then the Germans kept shooting away at it until they must have used up tons of ammunition, and there was us all the time laughing at them.”

But I think there is perhaps nothing in these letters that is more touching or more finely significant than this:

“The other day I stopped to assist a young lad of the West Kents, who had been badly hit by a piece of shell,” writes Corporal Sam Haslett. “He hadn’t long to live, and knew it, but he wasn’t at all put out about it. I asked him if there was any message I could take to any one at home, and the poor lad’s eyes filled with tears as he answered: ‘I ran away from home and ’listed a year ago. Mother and dad don’t know I’m here, but you tell them that I’m not sorry I did it.’ When I told our boys afterwards, they cried like babies, but, mind you, that’s the spirit that’s going to pull England through this war. I got his name and the address of his people from his regiment, and I am writing to tell them that they have every reason to be proud of their lad. He may have run away from home, but he didn’t run away from the Germans.”

And if you have caught the buoyant, heroic ardour that rings through those careless, unstudied notes our gallant fellows have written home, you know that there is not a man in the firing line who will.

Wyman & Sons Ltd., Printers, London and Reading.