seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the British
Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon
the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central
European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small
standing army upon the American model that was said, so far as it
went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent
administration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the
design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the opening
decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his military training was
manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it
as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover,
his habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and
hardships of service.

'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and--for no
earthly reason--without breakfast,' he relates. 'I suppose that is
to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us
thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel,
according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On
the last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting
over eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor
omnibus in nine minutes and a half--I did it the next day in that--and
then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us
all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came a
little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian
to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I
shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn't been
shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up to the
entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others would