I had a letter not long ago from a gunner Captain, also a Regular, who has been out almost since the beginning of the war.  He wrote:  “One of my best friends has just been killed”; and the “best friend” was not the fellow he had known at “the shop,” or played polo with in India, or hunted with in Ireland, but a scamp of a telephonist, who had stolen his whisky and owned up; who had risked his life for him, who had been a fellow-sportsman who could be relied on in a tight corner in the most risky of all games.

There is indeed a glamour and a pathos about the private soldier, especially when, as so often happens, he is really only a boy.  When you meet him in the trenches, wet, covered with mud, with tired eyes speaking of long watches and hours of risky work, he never fails to greet you with a smile, and you love him for it, and feel that nothing you can do can make up to him for it.  For you have slept in a much more comfortable place than he has.  You have had unlimited tobacco and cigarettes.  You have had a servant to cook for you.  You have fared sumptuously compared with him.  You don’t feel his superior.  You don’t want to be “gracious without undue familiarity.”  Exactly what you want to do is a bit doubtful—­the Major said he wanted to black his boots for him, and that is perhaps the best way of expressing it.

When he goes over the top and works away in front of the parapet with the moon shining full and the machine guns busy all along; when he gets back to billets, and throws off his cares and bathes and plays games like any irresponsible schoolboy; even when he breaks bounds and is found by the M.P. skylarking in ——­, you can’t help loving him.  Most of all, when he lies still and white with a red stream trickling from where the sniper’s bullet has made a hole through his head, there comes a lump in your throat that you can’t swallow; and you turn away so that you shan’t have to wipe the tears from your eyes.

Gallant souls, those boys, and all the more gallant because they hate war so much.  Their nerves quiver when a shell or a “Minnie” falls into the trench near them, and then they smile to hide their weakness.  They hate going over the parapet when the machine guns are playing; so they don’t hesitate, but plunge over with a smile to hide their fears.  Their cure for every mental worry is a smile, their answer to every prompting of fear is a plunge.  They have no philosophy or fanaticism to help them—­only the sporting instinct which is in every healthy British boy.

Then there are “the old men,” less attractive, less stirring to the imagination, less sensitive, but who grow upon you more and more as you get to know them.  Any one over twenty-three or so is an “old man.”  They have lost the grace, the irresponsibility, the sensibility of youth.  Their eyes and mouths are steadier, their movements more deliberate.  But they are the fellows whom you would choose for a patrol, or a raid, where a cool head and a stout heart are what is wanted.  It takes you longer to know these.  They are less responsive to your advances.  But when you have tested them and they have tested you, you know that you have that which is stronger than any terror of night or day, a loyalty which nothing can shake.