For as long as history lasts the
imagination of our people will strive to conjure up the vision of
those boys who, in the year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as
conscript soldiers, but as volunteers, for the old country's sake, to
take their risks and "do their bit" in the world's bloodiest war. I
saw those fellows day by day, touched hands with them, went into the
trenches with them, heard their first tales, and strolled into their
billets when they had shaken down for a night or two within sound of
the guns. History will envy me that, this living touch with the men
who, beyond any doubt, did in their simple way act and suffer things
before the war ended which revealed new wonders of human courage and
endurance. Some people envied me then--those people at home to whom
those boys belonged, and who in country towns and villages and
suburban houses would have given their hearts to get one look at them
there in Flanders and to see the way of their life. . . How were they
living? How did they like it? How were they sleeping? What did the
Regulars think of the New Army?
"Oh, a very cheerful lot," said a sergeant-major of the old Regular
type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed at
the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres,
which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day
before.
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