ir habit of moving
about roads and fields getting acquainted with their surroundings and
finding out if apples were ripe. For other portions of the country it
was a little unfair that these generous and well-paid spenders should
take the place of the opulent Australians in villages where small boys
already had hordes of pennies and shopkeepers were hastening to
replenish their stocks to be equal to their opportunities.

At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, but not to go in
against the Prussian Guard, which those with a sense of histrionic
fitness desired. When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at
Contalmaison he had said, "The Prussian Guard feels that it is
surrendering to a foe worthy of its steel when it yields to superior
numbers of the English Guard!" or words to that effect according to
reports, only to receive the answer that his captors were English
factory hands and the like of the New Army, whose officers excused
themselves, in the circumstances, for their identity as politely as
they could.

Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the Guards were the Guards,
England's crack regiments, the officers of each wearing their buttons in
a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with the distinctive
Guards' salute. In the Guards the old spirit of gaiety in face of danger
survived. Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of fire
joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender
man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset
man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel
blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner
worthy of tradition.

Though the English would have been glad to go against the Prussian Guard
with bayonet or bomb or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days
are not signaling to the enemy, "Let us have a go between your Guards
and our Guards!" but are putting crack regiments and line regiments in a
battle line to a common task, where the only criterion is success.

The presence of the Guards, however, yielded interest to another new
arrival on the Somme front. When the plan for a style of armored motor
car which would cross shell-craters and trenches was laid before an
eminent general at the War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from
further consideration might have been more blasphemous if he could have
spared the time to be anything but satirically brief. Suc