ly to
the front. For trench-digging, for hut-building, for the making and
repair of roads and railways, for the handling and unloading of
supplies and ammunition, for sanitation, salvage, moving the wounded
at casualty clearing stations, and a score of other needs, the demand
on the Labour battalions grew and grew.

How well I remember the shivering Kaffir boys and Indians at work on
the handling of stores and ammunition in the cold spring of 1917!--and
the navvy battalions on the roads before the Chinese had arrived in
force, and before the great rush of German prisoners began. Between
the British navvy battalions, many of them elderly men past military
age, or else unfit in some way for the fighting line, and their
comrades in the trenches, there were generally the friendliest
relations. The fighting man knew well what he owed to the "old boys."
I have before me an account by a Highland officer of the relation
between a navvy and a regular battalion in the Ypres salient. "Their
huts stretched along the side of the road which led us towards our
trenches; and every time we passed that way the sound of the pipes
would bring them out of their billets in crowds to cheer us in, or to
welcome us back if we were returning. They kept that road in splendid
repair, despite the heavy wear and tear of the endless traffic which
used it, and we blessed them many times. There was a two-miles stretch
across shell-torn, muddy country just behind the fighting line. Tired
men, just relieved from the trenches, and carrying heavy equipment,
naturally loathed it as a Slough of Despond; but when we struck the
good, honest surface of the navvy battalion's road, though there were
many miles still between us and rest, we felt the journey was as good
as over, so easy, by comparison, had marching become. A close
friendship grew up between our battalions. Our officers invited their
officers to dinner. Our men saluted their officers, and if one of our
officers happened to come on the scene of their operations, some old
veteran, wearing perhaps the medal ribbon of campaigns dating back a
generation, would call his gang to attention, and gravely give the
salute after the manner of thirty years ago. And when one realised
what the age of these men must be, who were wearing decorations of
Egyptian and Indian frontier campaigns, with not a few Zulu ribbons
among them, one marvelled at the skill and strength with which the old
fellows wielded pick and sh