l trial or judged beforehand to be unfit for the hardship of
life in the trenches. They were either sent down from their
battalions to the base or were stopped on the way up. For some time
their number steadily increased. Like the children of Israel in
Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, they became a nuisance to the
authorities.

Their existence in the camp was a standing menace to discipline.
Officially they were men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary
punished according to the scheme designed for and in the main
suitable to men. In reality they were boys, growing boys, some of
them not sixteen years of age, a few--the thing seems almost
incredible--not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever
managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a
fighting man remains mysterious. But they did.

These were besides boys of a certain particularly difficult kind. It
is not your "good" boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells
a lie about his age. It is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy
who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and
endure the hardships of a soldier's life for the sake of seeing
fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of
them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the
makings of men in them if properly treated.

The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane C.O. wants to
condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most
C.O.'s., even most sergeants, know that punishment of that kind,
however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally
unsuitable for a boy. At the same time if any sort of discipline is
to be preserved, a boy, who must officially be regarded as a man,
cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey
orders. That was the military difficulty.

The social and moral difficulty was, if anything, worse. Those boys
were totally useless to the army where they were, stuck in a large
camp. They were learning all sorts of evil and very little good. They
were a nuisance to the N.C.O.'s and men, among whom they lived, and
were bullied accordingly. They were getting no education and no
suitable physical training. They were in a straight way to be ruined
instead of made.

It was an Irish surgeon who realised the necessity for doing
something for these boys and set about the task. I do not suppose
that he wants his name published or