A year or two passes, and you meet the same lad again—­if indeed he is the same.  For a strange change has come over him:  he walks erect, he speaks clearly, he looks you boldly in the face, with eyes full of intelligence and self-respect; he is become civil and courteous now; he touches his cap to you ‘like a soldier;’ he can afford now to be respectful to others, because he respects himself, and expects you to respect him.  You talk to him, and find that the change is not merely outward, but inward; not owing to mere mechanical drill but to something which has been going on in his heart; and ten to one, the first thing that he begins to talk to you about, with honest pride, is his regiment.  His regiment.  Yes, there is the secret which has worked these wonders; there is the talisman which has humanized and civilized and raised from the mire the once savage boor.  He belongs to a regiment; in one word, he has become the member of a body.

The member of a body, in which if one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one member be honoured, all rejoice with it.  A body, which has a life of its own, and a government of its own, a duty of its own, a history of its own, an allegiance to a sovereign, all which are now his life, his duty, his history, his allegiance; he does not now merely serve himself and his own selfish lusts:  he serves the Queen.  His nature is not changed, but the thought that he is the member of an honourable body has raised him above his nature.  If he forgets that, and thinks only of himself, he will become selfish sluttish, drunken, cowardly, a bad soldier; as long as he remembers it, he is a hero.  He can face mobs now, and worse than mobs:  he can face hunger and thirst, fatigue, danger, death itself, because he is the member of a body.  For those know little, little of human nature and its weakness, who fancy that mere brute courage, as of an angry lion, will ever avail, or availed a few short weeks ago, to spur our thousands up the steeps of Alma, or across the fatal plain of Balaklava, athwart the corpses of their comrades, upon the deadly throats of Russian guns.  A nobler feeling, a more heavenly thought was needed (and when needed, thanks to God, it came!) to keep each raw lad, nursed in the lap of peace, true to his country and his Queen through the valley of the shadow of death.  Not mere animal fierceness:  but that tattered rag which floated above his head, inscribed with the glorious names of Egypt or Corunna, Toulouse or Waterloo, that it was which raised him into a hero:  he had seen those victories; the men who conquered there were dead long since:  but the regiment still lived, its history still lived, its honour lived, and that history, that honour were his, as well as those old dead warriors’:  he had fought side by side with them in spirit, though not in the flesh; and now his turn was come, and he must do as they did, and for their sakes, and count his own life a worthless thing for the sake of the body which he