So began a real friendship.

Began too, for Peter Jameson, a new life—the life which every untrained gentleman of the Empire who could spoof a recruiting doctor into passing him young enough or fit enough for service, was then living. A life neither of comfort nor—as many wrote and made much money by their writing—of good humour. A life of adults gone back to the irritation of school: save that for school-house they had sodden camps; for dining-hall, a draughty tent where fleecing contractors served half-cold meals; for schoolmasters, the incompetence of brave fellows wrongly employed.

But neither Peter nor Bromley concerned themselves over much, in those first weeks, with generalities. They realized, none better, that all was not well with the “Voluntary System,” with the Chalkshires; that Locksley-Jones’ influence with their Colonel continued to grow, that his pernicious example had already affected the junior officers. They realized—and went on with their work. For them, as for Fanshawe and Bareton in “C” Company, nothing save their men existed. And for every minute they lavished on their men, their men repaid them a hundredfold.

Those men! For, of the officers, one does not write. The well-educated, the well-off, the comfortable classes, must needs defend the country from which they draw their riches and their education: and he who did not do so—voluntarily, without compulsion or fear of compulsion—whatever his fancied responsibilities to his profession, to his businesses, to his housen, to his women or his children, is surely anathema maran atha, the moral leper, the pariah among his kind.

But those men! men of the People: uneducated, unwashed, foul-mouthed, drinkers and womanizers if you will; the “proletariat,” product of shop and Board School, of mill and mine, of farm and factory; those men who came voluntarily from all the earth, waving no flags, moved only by that dumb blind Anglo-Saxon spirit which has made and unmade Kings since the beginning of time! how shall one write of these?

They had, in those early days, neither leaders nor equipment. They trained, grotesquely, with blocks of rough wood—hewn to the semblance of a rifle. They were herded fourteen, sixteen and twenty together, in leaking tents, with never a floor-board between their one blanket and the mud below. They were flung out into our towns in suits of sloppy blue, in overcoats cobbled together by sweated aliens—a mockery on the public streets. They had scarcely any leave. Their wives and children starved because their separation-allowances were not paid. Their own food was cooked, weather permitting, in shallow trenches on the bare ground—with civilian houses fifty yards away.

And when the sodden camps chosen for them stood two feet deep in greasy slime, when neither their single blankets nor their single suits could be dried, when the fires would not burn and the sick-parade marched double-company-strong to the doctor’s tent half-a-mile away—then, they were vaccinated, willy-nilly, and left to cure their swollen arms as best they might, jostling against each other in their crowded styes!

Till gradually that first fine enthusiasm, which made them trainable even by the untrained, oozed from their souls—even as the mud oozed up through the ground on which they slept: till all the keenness, and all the joy, and all the glory of the finest profession in the world evaporated; leaving nothing save the dour stark spirit of Anglo-Saxondom to carry them on.

And as, in mud and muddle and incompetence, these early volunteers began their soldiering; so, in blood and incompetence and disaster, most of them ended it. Yet though they grumbled, they never weakened; though the song died on their lips and the jest from their eyes, neither their hearts nor their limbs flinched from the tasks appointed.

Let library-historians give the palm to this Field-Marshal or that Statesman if they will, we who did our best for him know that it was the “common man,” “poor bloody Tommy”—on his lorry or his ration-cart, at his telephone-station or his observation-post, in his trench or his gun-pit—“poor bloody Tommy,” hungry sometimes, tired mostly, frightened to the depths of his unimaginative soul, but enduring always, who staved off every British defeat and won every British victory all the way back from Mons to CompiÈgne and all the way forward from CompiÈgne back to Mons again.

Pray God that he find honest leaders—for leaders he must have—in this future he has won for us!