In a short account written for his school magazine, H. summarizes the experiences of his own regiment at Ypres thus:
“All the officers in my company are wounded or invalided. The men are very cheerful under all the hardships and losses, and their behaviour under fire is splendid. The Brigade (5th) has been taken three times at least to ‘mend the line’ where the Germans had broken through. From October 24 to November 5 my regiment lost about 450 officers and men--mostly, thank God, wounded. The Germans can’t shoot for nuts, but their artillery fire is accurate and _incessant_, and the machine-guns very deadly.”
There is nothing more touching than the devotion of the officers to their men. They feel towards them truly as if they were their children.
“No officer,” said the widow of a great general to us the other day, “ever thinks of himself in action, ever casts a thought to the bullets flying about him. Indeed, the officers don’t seem to believe they can get hit; they’re so occupied in looking after their men. All the time they’re looking at their men.”
Even as we write these lines we see the death, in the Dardanelles, of a young officer who had been under H. when he was training reserves during his recent period of convalescent home service. This youth was, in our brother’s eyes, the perfection of young manhood. He prophesied for him great things. He told us many stories of his quaint humour and incisive wit. One anecdote remains. Among their recruits were between twenty and thirty extremely bad characters--slack, undisciplined fellows, worthless material belonging almost to the criminal classes. After working in vain with all his energy to endeavour to put some kind of soldierly discipline into them, young W. paraded them in the barrack yard, and addressed them in the following language:
“His Majesty’s Government cannot afford nowadays to spend money uselessly. You are a dead waste to the nation. You are not worth the food you get nor the clothes you wear. It has been decided, therefore, to send you to the front; and, as every man is bound to do his utmost to help his country in the present crisis, it is earnestly to be hoped that you will, each one of you, endeavour to get himself shot as soon as possible.”