ceptional good fortune to be stationed for many months in
a large convalescent camp. I might have been attached to a brigade,
in which case I should have known perhaps Irish, or Scots, or men
from some one or two parts of England; but them only. That camp in
which I worked received men from every branch of the service and from
every corner of the empire. A knowledge of the cap badges to be seen
any day in that camp would have required long study and a good
memory. From the ubiquitous gun of the artillery to the FIJI of a
South Sea Island contingent we had them all at one time or another.

And the variety of speech and accent was as great as the variety of
cap badges. It was difficult to believe--I should not have believed
beforehand--that the English language could be spoken in so many
different ways. But it was the men themselves, more than their varied
speech and far-separated homes, who made me feel how widely the net
of service has swept through society and how many different kinds of
men are fighting in the army.

I happened one day to fall into conversation with a private, a young
man in very worn and even tattered clothes. He had been "up against
it" somewhere on the Somme front, and had not yet been served out
with fresh kit. The mud of the ground over which he had been fighting
was thickly caked on most parts of his clothing, and he was
endeavouring to scrape it off with the blade of a penknife. He smiled
at me in a particularly friendly way when I greeted him, and we
dropped into a conversation which lasted for quite a long time. He
showed me, rather shyly, a pocket edition of Herodotus which he had
carried about in his pocket and had read at intervals during the time
he was fighting on the Somme.

A private who quotes Latin in the waggon of a troop train. A battered
soldier who reads Greek for his own pleasure in the trenches, is more
surprising still. The Baron Bradwardwine took Livy into battle with
him. But there must be ten men who can read Livy for every one who
can tackle Herodotus without a dictionary.

A piano is an essential part of the equipment of a recreation hut in
France. The soldier loves to make music, and it is surprising how
many soldiers can make music of a sort. Pity is wasted on inanimate
things. Otherwise one's heart's sympathy would go out to those
pianos. It would be a dreadful thing for an instrument of feeling to
have "Irish Eyes," "The Only Girl in the World," and "Home Fires,"