ng. Early in the month masses of snowdrops
lined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green, the roads hard and
dry under the eager feet of Kitchener's great army. For months they
had been drilling, struggling with the intricacies of a new career,
working and waiting. And now it was spring, and soon they would be
off. Some had already gone.

"Lucky beggars!" said the ones who remained, and counted the days.

And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were squads: Scots in
plaid kilts with khaki tunics; less picturesque but equally imposing
regiments in the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishable
from their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful determination to
get over and help the boys across the Channel to assist in holding
that more than four hundred miles of battle line against the invading
hosts of Germany.

Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply of war: bands
playing, the steady tramp of numberless feet, the muffled clatter of
accoutrements, the homage of the waiting crowd. And they deserved
homage, those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more than
boys, marching along with a fine, full swing. There is something
magnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm, in the sight of a great
volunteer army. The North and the South knew the thrill during our own
great war. Conscription may form a great and admirable machine, but it
differs from the trained army of volunteers as a body differs from a
soul. But it costs a country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army;
for the flower of the country goes. That, too, America knows, and
England is learning.

They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here
and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men,
some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the
same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed
against the old lion's foes.

For King and Country!

All through England, all through France, all through that tragic
corner of Belgium which remains to her, are similar armies, drilling
and waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the
thing they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious
region which had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the
trenches, in the operating, rooms of field hospitals, at outposts
between the confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in hand
with death. I had seen it in its dirt and horro