room for them), and before nightfall had examined 40 of them under the rays and operated on 20. If the little village churchyard saw more soldiers buried there during those three months of the summer of 1916 than during all the previous twenty months of our hospital's existence, we know that not one was lost because our organisation was stretched and strained beyond breaking-point. Each case got the best and most prompt attention possible. The auxiliary services behind the lines did not fail the men who risked and gave all during the fierce fighting of the first great Push. What they faced in the fighting their comrades and themselves alone know. What they faced in suffering afterwards, and how they faced it, we, working in sheltered security far in the rear, know well. Honour to them all honour and green remembrance.

When they were first brought in, the men, as a rule, were too exhausted and ill to talk, but there were exceptions. Some Frenchmen are all that popular imagination has pictured them ―nervous, excitable, dramatic; though, indeed, it would astonish many English people could they see the product of the new two-year-old esprit des tranchees -a quiet, sober man with a dogged tenacity and fatalistic courage that can and does endure and hold on to the bitter end, be it defeat or victory. This grim endurance follows the French soldier down into the valley of the shadow of death and beyond; it is still

there, his inalienable possession when he comes up on the other side, alive, but grievously wounded. There is great inspiration in it to others whose courage is not of so high an order. Thus these tortured and broken men are silent mostly, intent on bearing their pain dumbly, and on giving those who tend them as little trouble as might be.

Yet I have known others in whom the fire of excitement and enthusiasm still burned when they were brought to us, twelve, fifteen, or twenty hours after they were wounded. These men, that July, were strangely exultant. The French Army and the French soldier had been vindicated. They had broken the German line. They had always believed that France would conquer-some day; that the invaders would be driven off her sacred soil: now they knew it, had themselves had a hand in the demonstration of it. Some of them, well educated men from the crack regiments, were strongly moved. British patriotism is a social thing, a matter of race and institutions and traditions. There is a mystical feeling for the very soil of the land about the French devotion to La Patrie. This pressing back of the hereditary foe from invaded France had touched these thoughtful men in their deepest emotions. I had always known that the French Army would not listen to any talk of a premature and ignoble peace, though individual French soldiers loathe the war

beginning-then it fails, and once more the hideousness, the eruelty, and the senseless wastefulness of war stands stark before you. How they hate it too, these strong boys! And still, if one talks with them, how they all come back to the same sheet - anchor of resolution: they are consciously fighting and suffering and dying, not only in defence of their native land, but of social sanity, freedom-in fine, of civilisation. It is the only thought that can bring comfort, not only to those who suffer and die, but to those bereaved ones who live on, and to those who have to watch the pain of both.

There is no militarism among these French soldiers. The militaire by trade, the daredevil Colonials, are far from deifying their calling. Men of gold lace and galons they abhor. To them an officer is only a leader if he leads, and a master if his courage and war experience surpasses their own. If he is a tried and brave soldier, with a personality to win their allegiance, they will, as one of them expressed it to me, follow him to hell! But if he is a chocolate soldier well, these Colonials speak their minds, themselves daring disciplinary punishment and death with cynical cheerfulness. There are few of them left, say the veterans: and of their original officers, men for whom they would have died, none. The Colonial Division has bought its glory at a high price. Its military traditions, and a veteran here

and there to tell of them, are all that is left of it. The new men who fill its ranks and wear its uniform have something to live up to.

As for the conscripts, those who are not fathers, fighting that their children may possess the land of France in security and peace, are sons heartily sick of warfare, and determined that never in their lifetime shall the enemy have excuse to force them to fight again. If any British people fear that France may be persuaded to a premature and inglorious peace, let them go among the French soldiers and their women - folk who have already given all, and who have not given it that the same sacrifice may be required of another generation in the years to come. The sons of the fathers of 1870 allowed themselves to be lulled into sleep and false security. The fathers of 1914 will not risk an awakening for their sons such as they themselves received two years ago. France will fight to a finish.

Rather is it in England, among those who do not yet understand that this is a war of civilisation against reaction, of a free Europe against a militarist tyranny, in which victory is more important to us personally than the life and ease of any one individual of us who have not yet suffered intimately as the French have suffered when all is said and done-rather is it among those whom you have to fear 8 movement for peace without honour, peace at any price

now that Germany may make war at her own price later on! Perhaps I did not learn all this in the first week of July 1916-or rather it was there written plain enough in that hospital full of wounded French soldiers-but it was brought home to me during the summer and autumn months that followed, when the initial push had hardened into steady, relentless, unyielding pressure. The first week of the First Great Push!-perhaps before this appears in print we may be in the thick of the first week of the Final Great Pressure. If it serves to bring home to any British reader a little more forcibly what the French are fighting for, and how they are fighting in the Final Great Push, it will have

been worth while setting down my impressions of July 1916, gleaned among the men who had fought and fallen in that epic of effort and suffering which we call the Battle of the Somme. It is our British soldiers who hold that ground now. When the time comes for them to advance from the positions won last year by the French, perhaps they will see, with the mind's eye, as many a French soldier vows he has seen with his bodily vision, regiment after regiment of ghostly blue-clad men, with burning eyes and bayonets fixed, leaping out of the trenches and over the top beside them, comrades still, though they rest now for ever in the peace of death. SKIA.

IT is a matter of close upon ten years ago since Walter Amherst died of blackwater fever at a God - forsaken outstation on the Gold Coast named Aumakru, or something like it. Amherst was, by rights, a medical officer,-not a political, but in those days the Government was often hard up for men, and frequently set a doctor to do the work of a District Commissioner, as occasionally befalls even now in the distant Northern Territories. This, as any medical man will tell you, is "to cut blocks with a razor"; while if you are to believe the men in the political service, it is equivalent to putting a lapdog in charge of a flock of rams. Amherst, however, happened to be one of those men who are cut out for administrative work among a primitive people. He was immensely energetic, abnormally keen, devouringly inquisitive, and possessed, moreover, the sort of personality that is caloulated to impress itself upon the popular imagination. The district in his charge consisted of some five hundred square miles of virgin forest, situated at a distance of five days' hard march from the coast, and his big lean figure speedily became a familiar sight to the inhabitants of every mud village within his jurisdiction. He never used a hammock

and indeed in that hilly jungle country ten years ago there were few places where a hammock could be used,—and his pedestrian powers were extraordinary. He was ubiquitous, and was constantly turning up where he was least expected, to the intense discomfort of the local Chiefs and Headmen, who naturally liked to have timely warning of the coming of the District Commissioner, in order that all things caloulated to offend the susceptibilities of a white man might be decently removed in anticipation of his visit. Even the most elaborate system of "drumming" failed to advertise his movements, for he never seemed to travel in the direction which was to be anticipated, and the manner in which he was for ever dropping from the skies into some wholly unprepared locality, reduced the local authorities, whose business it was to let him see just as much as, but no more than, was good for him, to a condition bordering upon a state of nervous exhaustion.

The effect of this was all the more depressing, because the Aumakru district was in those days one of the most fetishridden places in the whole of the colony. This meant, of course, that there was much to be hidden which it became increasingly impossible to hide