working and waiting. And now it was spring, and soon they would be
off. Some had already gone.

"Lucky beggars!" said the ones who remained, and counted the days.

And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were squads: Scots in
plaid kilts with khaki tunics; less picturesque but equally imposing
regiments in the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishable
from their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful determination to
get over and help the boys across the Channel to assist in holding
that more than four hundred miles of battle line against the invading
hosts of Germany.

Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply of war: bands
playing, the steady tramp of numberless feet, the muffled clatter of
accoutrements, the homage of the waiting crowd. And they deserved
homage, those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more than
boys, marching along with a fine, full swing. There is something
magnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm, in the sight of a great
volunteer army. The North and the South knew the thrill during our own
great war. Conscription may form a great and admirable machine, but it
differs from the trained army of volunteers as a body differs from a
soul. But it costs a country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army;
for the flower of the country goes. That, too, America knows, and
England is learning.

They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here
and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men,
some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the
same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed