on parade, and their intercourse is carried on through the prescribed
channels. Even if you do get keen on a particular squad of recruits,
or a particular class of would-be bombers, you lose them so soon that
your enthusiasm never ripens into anything like intimacy. But at the
front you have your own platoon; and week after week, month after
month, you are living in the closest proximity; you see them all day,
you get to know the character of each individual man and boy, and the
result in nearly every case is this extraordinary affection of which I
have spoken.

You will find it in the most unlikely subjects. I have heard a Major,
a Regular with, as I thought, a good deal of regimental stiffness,
talk about his men with a voice almost choked with emotion. "When
you see what they have to put up with, and how amazingly cheery they
are through it all, you feel that you can't do enough for them. They
make you feel that you're not fit to black their boots." And then he
went on to tell how it was often the fellows whom in England you had
despaired of, fellows who were always "up at orders," who out at the
front became your right-hand men, the men on whom you found yourself
relying.

I had a letter not long ago from a gunner Captain, also a Regular, who
has been out almost since the beginning of the war. He wrote: "One of
my best friends has just been killed"; and the "best friend" was not
the fellow he had known at "the shop," or played polo with in India,
or hunted with in Ireland, but a scamp of a telephonist, who had
stolen his whisky and owned up; who had risked his life for him, who
had been a fellow-sportsman who could be relied on in a tight corner
in the most risky of all games.