enius in estimating
and fitting the various proportions of the men. And the men's eyes
brightened at the sight of the glorious new red cloth; I believe that,
although they wore it for a few days only, it did much to reconcile
them with the inconvenience and hardship that some of them endured in
rejoining. Khaki uniforms were served out later.

All round the barrack square the men stood in groups as I have
described, and in one corner were clusters of men arrayed in their new
garments. One could read pretty easily in their faces the story of the
last few days. One saw several men who had evidently risen in the world
since they had left the army. They had an air of sleekness and delicacy
that made them seem out of place. Others had evidently been going down
in the social scale, and wore their new clothes like fine feathers. Some
were evidently glad at the prospect of action and excitement, and fell
back into the regimental routine as a man sits down in a comfortable
chair. To others, not a few, all this hustle was an act in a domestic
tragedy. Sometimes it was a comedy, as in the case of one man who had
built up a "nice little butchering business," snatching his profits from
the niggard hand of competition; and now he must go forth to kill men,
leaving his rival master in the field of domestic butchery. But the
comedies were few, or else I did not come across them, for it was the
serious side of this business that impressed me the most. Men caught
away from new-found family joys, not for personal advancement or glory,
but to take their places as units in the huge war-machine that is fed
with human bodies. It is so easy to speak and think of "losses" when we
count them by the hundred; it is so hard and bitter to think of one
death and all that it means when one stands and speaks to a soldier. I
found one man standing apart by himself--a young man, with a good,
clean, hardy face--and there were tears in his eyes. As I was passing he
asked me what time it was, and in a few minutes he told me his story. He
had been married two years; he had one little child; he had left his
wife dying of pneumonia. That was all; but I think one can hardly
realise how much it meant. I should like some civilians who do their
soldiering in an armchair, and who really seem to like a war for the
spice with which it flavours their newspaper, to have seen that man and
heard his short tale of misery.[1] He is, of course, one of the few on
whom an adm