That
is to say, there are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of
1,500."
That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long
history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France
by its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first
August of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a
festival, toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading
them with fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit
and training. As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a
sudden check by forces they had despised. They held their fire until
the German ranks were within eight hundred yards of them, and then
mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire--before we had machine-
guns, except as rare specimens, here and there. Our horse artillery
was beyond any doubt the best in the world at that time. Even before
peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency
of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this
was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained.
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