of taking shelter never seemed to occur to them; they openly rejoiced at being under fire....  Perhaps though they mended our roads and gave us easy walking, they helped us most by the quiet steadfastness of their example.  One never saw them toiling away in the deathtrap of the Ypres salient without realising that they were the fathers of our generation, men who had already spent themselves in Britain’s cause when we were children, and had now come out to serve her again, at her call, and to watch how we young ones played up.”

Some more recent notes from G.H.Q. dwell warmly on the invaluable services rendered by the Labour Corps in the Battle of Cambrai, November, 1917, in the defensive battle of last spring, and in the autumn attacks which ended the war.  In the Cambrai attack the Labour men were concentrated 1,000 yards behind the line, so as to be ready for immediate advance.  A light railway was run into Marcoing within twenty-four hours of its capture, and another into Moeuvres under heavy fire, while the approaches to the bridges over the Canal du Nord were carried out by men working only 1,000 yards from the enemy machine guns posted on one of the locks of the Canal.  In the withdrawals of last March and April, throughout the heavy defensive fighting of those dangerous weeks, no men were steadier.  Theirs was the heavy work of digging new defence lines—­at night—­with long marches to and from their billets.  Casualties and wastage were heavy, but could not be helped, as fighting men could not be spared.  Yet the units concerned behaved “with the greatest gallantry.”  “One company,” says a report from G.H.Q., “worked day and night in a forward ammunition dump for three days, and then marched seventy miles in six days, working a day and night in another ammunition dump on the way, with no transport but one G.S. wagon to help them; in their retirements, effected as they were with almost no transport, they lost practically all their equipment, and yet without getting time to rest and re-equip, they had to be moved at once to work on defence lines.”

The total number of Labour men employed in stemming the German rush on Amiens, by the construction of new lines of defence, was no less than 62,000—­two-thirds, nearly, of the whole British Army at Waterloo!

Then, when our counter-attack began, the task of the Labour men was reversed.  Now it was for them to go forward, well ahead of the reserves, and some 1,000 yards ahead of the skilled transport troops and the construction trains that were laying the line for which the Labour men prepared the way.  Death or wounds were always in the day’s risks, but the Labour men “held on.”  By this time there were 350,000 men under the Labour Directorate—­a force about equal to our whole Territorial and Regular Army before the war.  They were a strange and motley host!—­95,000 British, 84,000 Chinese, 138,000 Prisoners of War, 1,500 Cape Coloured, 4,000 West Indians, 11,000 South African natives, 100 Fijians, 7,500 Egyptians, 1,500 Indians—­so run the principal items.  The catalogue given of their labours covers all the rough work of the war household.  They were the handy men everywhere, adding on occasion forestry and agriculture to their war-work, and the British Labour battalions were, of course, the stiffening and superintending element for the rest.