their faces. There is a stalwart independence in their strong mouths and
foreheads and chins which rivets one's interest. Every face is different
from the next. Each man seems to be thinking for himself, and ready to
stand up for his own decision against the world. There is a sort of
reasoned determination uniting them into a single whole, which, one
thinks, must be a very terrible sort of whole to meet in anger.

And it is. The Scotsman is, I think, the most unrelenting fighter that I
have come across. The Australian is a most fierce fighter in battle, but
he is quite ready to make friends afterwards with his enemy. Once he has
taken a German prisoner, he is apt to treat him more liberally than most
troops--more so even, I think, than the English soldier--and that is
saying a good deal. To the Scotsman, when he escorts his prisoners home,
those prisoners are Germans still. He has never forgotten the tremendous
losses which Scottish regiments suffered at the beginning of the war. He
does not feel kindly towards the men who inflicted them. With the
Australian, once the fight is over, the bitterness is left behind. The
Scotsman makes prisoners, but he does not make friends.

I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish
driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter. He had
not been in the Army Service Corps in those days. He was in a certain
famous regiment of infantry--joined up in the first weeks of the war as
a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once--by
some process which I do not now understand--to replace heavy casualties.
He was with them through that first winter in their miserable,
overflowing apology for a trench. It was a shallow ditch with a wretched
parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into
the trench over the top of the ground at night--they had actually to
approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a