And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them.  There are other schools within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.

“Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass,” wrote a Sikh soldier home, “and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land.”

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey, bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war.  Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water.  They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire.  I was homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is the secret of the American’s nervous energy.  It seemed to me that it was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true equine gentry.  Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.

You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter?  What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for England?  Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional white faces.  These were the men; these the force.

The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they did in that climate, but that they fought at all.  What welcome summer brought from their gleaming black eyes!  July or August could not be too hot for them.  On a plateau one afternoon I saw them in a gymkhana.  It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the neighbourhood.  Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances.  The French peasants clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, “Good!” when the performer succeeded, or, “Too bad!” when he failed.