reported."

CONSCRIPT COURAGE

You must know plenty of people--if you yourself are not one of
them--who hold out stoutly against any military compulsion or
conscription in the belief that the "fetched" man can never be the
equal in valor and fighting instinct of the volunteer, can only be a
source of weakness in any platoon, company and regiment. This tale may
throw a new light on that argument.

Gerald Bunthrop was not a conscript in the strict sense of the word,
because when he enlisted no legal form of conscription existed in the
United Kingdom; but he was, as many more have been, a moral conscript,
a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting,
very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circumstance and
pressure from without himself. Before the War the Army and its ways
were to him a sealed book. Of war he had the haziest ideas compounded
of novels he had read and dimly remembered and mental pictures in a
confused jumble of Charles O'Malley dragoons on spirited charges,
half-forgotten illustrations in the papers of pith-helmeted infantry in
the Boer War, faint boyhood recollections of Magersfontein and the
glumness of the "Black Week"--a much more realistic and vivid
impression of Waterloo as described by Brigadier Gerard--and odd
figures of black Soudanese, of Light Brigade troopers, of Peninsula
red-coats, of Sepoys and bonneted Highlanders in the Mutiny period, and
of Life Guard sentries at Whitehall, lines of fixed bayonets on City
procession routes, and khaki-clad Terriers seen about railway stations
and on bus-tops with incongruous rifles on Saturday afternoons.
Actually, it is not correct to include these living figures in his
vague idea of war. They had to him no connection with anything outside
normal peaceful life, stirred his thoughts to war no more than seeing a
gasbracket would wake him to imaginings of a coalmine or a pit
explosion. His slight conceptions of war, then, were a mere matter of
print and books and pictures, and the first months of this present war
were exactly the same, no more and no less--newspaper paragraphs and
photos and drawings in the weeklies hanging on the bookstalls. He read
about the Retreat and the Advance, skimmed the prophets' forecasts,
gulped the communiques with interest a good deal fainter than he read
the accounts of the football matches or a boxing bout. He expected "our
side" to win of course, and was quite patriotic; was in fact a