The Food Problem

The Food Problem

Part VII of ‘England in Arms’

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, November 1917

To date the problem faced in the feeding of the people of the British Isles is not that of food shortage, but of food distribution. To the foreigner that assertion may seem to deprive the situation of most of its seriousness; to us who live through it and watch its development there­in lies more menace than in the ex­pressed hopes of the Kaiser. British ingenuity may be depended upon more confidently to overcome the enemy than to alter internal affairs in order to cope with unusual condi­tions. Nothing is so powerful against the Englishman as his habits and system.

No one in the British Isles has felt the pinch of hunger. And it is not likely that anyone will. What suffer­ing there has been arises from the temporary shortage of unessentials and from high prices. Sugar and potatoes sum up the total of national deprivations owing to the war, and never did they approach privations because there has always been some­thing to take their places. Before there is actual want the British will have solved the submarine. But after three years of a situation that has continually pointed to food as one of the vital factors in the winning of victory they are only now nearing the solution of a situation with which the enemy has nothing to do—which is, indeed, indigenous to the British race, but more particularly to that section of it residing in England and Scotland.

The problem of distribution is two­fold. The limitation of supplies—rather the necessity of conserving for an uncertain future—demands an equality of distribution that ignored individuals and class. The second difficulty is the British character—an independence which resents con­trol and dictation. Of the two the latter was the more immediately dan­gerous at the beginning of the con­servation movement. But common sense is asserting itself, so that equal­ity of distribution now occupies the time of the Food Controller. When he found temperance in eating to be so necessary as to justify Govern­ment action, the Englishman yield­ed to a pressure which he naturally resists. But having yielded, he was forced to set to work on the national system of class favouritism—as, in­deed, he has been forced to do in every problem connected with the war.

It was Britain’s unquestioned com­mand of the seas that delayed food measures which were reasonable from the very first gun. That inbred and time-honoured confidence in victory laid a heavy hand on reasonable pro­vision and prevision in every act of war. In the matter of food arbitrary measures did not seem to be necessary early in the struggle. Depend­ing entirely, as it did, on the control of the seas, Great Britain was justi­fied in her confidence, a confidence that would never have been shaken had the Germans adhered to the rules of warfare.

One measure only was taken early in the war to protect the food supply of the British Isles, an obvious one immediately demanded by the fact that they had been procuring more than sixty per cent. of their sugar from Germany. A Sugar Commis­sion was appointed. Thereafter, for more than two years, even when the casual onlooker was viewing the situa­tion with alarm and the Asquith Gov­ernment itself was talking much of plans in the House, nothing further was done. Always in the mind of the people was the thought that the enemy could not drive Great Britain to defensive measures that would re­flect upon its special sphere of power; and in the mind of the Government was the hope that political balances need not be disturbed by restrictive action certain to be resented in some quarters. For it must not be imag­ined that party aims and hopes dis­appeared with the formation of a Coalition Cabinet.

The second official move of import­ance was made in October, 1916, when a Wheat Commission undertook to readjust the grain situation. Unfor­tunately it was weighted down with the Asquith love of laisser-faire, and its duties never materialized into ef­fective action. At a time when the enemy was openly sinking merchant vessels and threatening more, when the demands of military operations and national supply were so deflect­ing shipping from the ordinary chan­nels of food transportation that re­serves of grain in the British Isles were being seriously depleted, no action was taken towards replenish­ing these supplies from a world’s pro­duction that was above the normal. America and Australia were offering the grain, but England was not will­ing to disturb the trend of affairs in order to facilitate the acceptance of the offers.

The press of England was becom­ing alive to the menace, and the Eng­lish press has a voice more powerful than that of its brother across the ocean. The people were growing anxious. The difficulty of securing sugar was impressing even the thoughtless with the need for action. Mr. Asquith was forced to promise operations which were loathsome to him, not alone for their antagonism to his policy, but for the danger he well saw would arise therefrom to his personal popularity. He an­nounced the establishment of a new department headed by a Food Con­troller. It promised well. But the Food Controller was never appoint­ed. Week after week the country waited. Mr. Asquith was at his best in his promises of what that import­ant official would do—in his explana­tions of the delay. He was at his most natural in his inability to come to the point of action.

It was the accumulation of such dilatory acts as these that brought about his downfall. Just three days before an anxious Cabinet, backed by a roused people, demanded his resig­nation, Mr. Runciman, one of his Ministers, placed before the country one lone food measure that even then looked like a small mouse for the mountain to bring forth. Restric­tions were placed on restaurant fare—or rather attempted restrictions. Luncheon was to be a two-course meal and the ample English restaurant dinner was to be limited to three courses.

With that heritage Lloyd George assumed power. His first discovery in connection with the food situation was that his predecessor had taken no inventory of the nation’s supplies, had made no move to simplify the work of the Food Department, which had immediately to be organized. One of the first officials appointed in the new Government was a Food Con­troller, Lord Devonport, a man whose intimate connection with food supply as the head of a large multiple store company seemed to qualify him for the position. It was a disappointment to the country and to the Premier himself that the seeming qualifica­tions for the Controller’s office should in the end prove the insuperable obstacle to his effectiveness. Lord Devonport introduced many measures intended to cope with a situation passing rapidly into a serious stage, but a calm survey of them discovers them to be, after all, paltry, a mere touching of the surface.

Lord Devonport took pleasure in vetoing the Runciman restaurant or­der four months after it had been put into effect, and almost the same time after its folly had become evi­dent. The limited course meal brought only one result, that diners ate more solid meat, and less of the odds and ends, the entrees and unessentials and make-overs, that give the dainti­est touch to restaurant fare without affecting food stocks. Men formerly content with a small helping of meat in the interests of the decorative courses, demanded meat and bread and cheese, the basis of subsistence. The new Food Controller, too, was forced to deal with bread, tea, con­fectionery, potatoes and other vege­tables, and sugar.

His substitute for the Runciman restaurant control was a meatless day and a limitation of the amounts of meat, bread and sugar served at each meal. This was later altered because of its drain on bread in order to take the place of meat on the meatless day. Bread he attempted to regulate by prohibiting its sale until twelve hours after baking, and by limiting its shape, weight and constituents. The adulteration of flour by maize or rice, and the prohibition of the waste that produces white flour, resulted in what is known as war bread. It was an effective measure, despite the con­tinued opposition of the people. Tea—considered in England almost as great a food necessity as bread—was regulated in its cheaper qualities. A curb was put on the use of sugar in confectionery, pastry and icing. In the early part of 1917 potatoes were passing so rapidly into the list of shortages that price limitation was necessary. Three cents a pound for old stock was established for the early months, rising later a half-cent. But no measures could increase the sup­ply, and no attempt was made to pre­vent the farmers holding their stocks for higher prices. For months it might be said there were no potatoes in England. And with the failure of potatoes the vegetable substitutes ad­vanced until the Food Controller was forced to limit the price of some of them.

Where Lord Devonport failed was in his reluctance to take a firm stand, to enforce the law, and principally to curtail the profits of the trader. He attempted to solve the problem by appeal. A chart of patriotic pro­portions in the daily diet was flung at the public in a thousand ways. The fences were covered with it, the news­papers gave it daily space, lecturers flooded the country, and, at a time when the shortage of paper was seri­ous, the workingmen’s pay envelopes were crammed with a literature he never read. To the credit of the coun­try the consumption of bread and meat materially decreased. But the two insuperable obstacles to success were the inability of ninety per cent. of the people to purchase the advised ration of sugar and the eagerness of some to seize the opportunity for gorging. While there were millions willing to curb their appetites there were flaunting thousands of pro-Ger­man sympathies or utter carelessness whose delight it was to evade the ap­peal and the laws. And at the very time when the people were begged to stint themselves interned and impri­soned Germans were allowed many times the ration; sugar and potatoes were being commandeered for them when the workers of the country had to go without. The inconsistencies of the situation were intolerable, and the effectiveness of the appeal diminished weekly.

In the matter of enforcing the law there was singular laxness. Here and there a dealer was fined, although it was impossible to go on the streets without seeing plainly advertised in­fractions of the food laws. And the fine was usually but a small part of the profit made from the illicit trans­action. Indeed, there was apparent, in store and home and restaurant, a merry revelry of law evasion that un­did the patriotism of those who hon­estly rationed themselves.

Profiteering went on without re­striction. Lord Devonport, head of a big grocery concern, persisted in refusing to limit the profits of gro­cers save in a few glaring and insig­nificant cases. Swedes, for instance, the substitute for potatoes, were limit­ed in price to three cents a pound, a price so many times what the farmer and greengrocer had been receiving that neither could complain. The setting of prices for potatoes and beans was much advertised but unimport­ant, for both disappeared from the market almost immediately. Although the cost of bread to miller and baker was materially decreased by the new laws, the price advanced instantly to the consumer two to four cents a four-pound loaf. While a few bakers out­side London were content with the profits from seventeen-cent bread, the London baker charged twenty-four. The attempt to democratize tea was a failure. Forty per cent. of the im­portations were to be sold to the pub­lic at fifty-two and fifty-six cents, but no one was ever able to purchase a pound of the cheaper price, to my knowledge, and if the better quality of Government tea was inquired for it was either out of stock or sneered at by the grocer. Neither price was ever displayed in the windows dur­ing Lord Devonport’s term. The same happened with cheese. A large part of it was taken over by the Govern­ment to be sold over the counter for thirty-two cents, but it never appear­ed on the shelves of more than a very few stores.

With meat no attempt was made to interfere until the last days of Lord Devonport’s office, and then only the speculator was eliminated, the re­tailer being permitted to ask what he pleased. Of the retailers the butcher was the most heartless profiteer, the consumer being asked sixty to one hundred and fifty per cent. profit over the wholesale prices. Even the sup­plies controlled by the Government, such as New Zealand mutton, were turned loose upon arrival in England for the wholesaler and retailer to make what profit he wished. Laid down in London by the Government at thirteen cents, it reached the pub­lic at thirty-six to sixty cents. The butcher could not buy it without a large purchase of English mutton at extravagant prices. And in the mean­time, in order to maintain the level of prices, tons of meat were left to rot on the docks.

There is no better example of the injudicious and unfair distribution of supplies than sugar, the commodity that has induced several crises al­ready. To the people the only result of the Sugar Commission was an im­mediate rise in price. Against this there has been constant complaint, for it is known that the rise repre­sented taxation and Government pro­fit. It was not until the latter part of 1916 that a shortage began serious­ly to be felt; but from the first pinch the shortage increased until stocks seemed to have disappeared from the market, so far as the poorer classes were concerned. By December women were walking the streets from shop to shop begging half-pounds. Queues had not then commenced, because sugar was the only shortage and the grocer sold only to whom he liked.

It is this independence of the mer­chant that has driven home to the country the disaster of typical of­ficial control, so called. Each week the Sugar Commission released to the wholesalers their shares of the avail­able supplies, and washed their hands of any further connection with the commodity. Theoretically the whole­saler was supposed to pass on to the grocer his share, but that he had favourites is proved by the fact that some of the large West End stores seemed never to be without sugar, while the small grocer of the East End was denied a pound. It must be remembered that every pound of sugar shipped to England was Gov­ernment-controlled. No control what­ever was exercised over the retailer save in the matter of price, and the shortage of the available supplies en­abled him to make sugar the basis of his trade. He sold to whom he pleas­ed in the quantities he pleased. His independence became impudence. A customer was always a beggar, for he was entirely at the mercy of his gro­cer. Sugar was denied those who could not afford to make their pur­chases extravagant. Some system seemed to arrive with the demand for a purchase of fifty cents’ worth of other goods with each half-pound or pound of sugar, and this was accept­ed by the authorities as a wise pro­vision against wasteful purchases of the limited commodity. It was the strength of class in England that for many months prevented the authori­ties from realizing that such a stipu­lation reserved sugar for the rich who could afford to buy supplies they did not need in order to obtain the sugar they did. It was only when the mer­chants began to extend the same de­mand to the purchase of other food­stuffs that the Government forbade any conditions with the sale of sugar. But the grocer was still left to sell to whom he pleased. No improvement whatever resulted, since the grocer simply refused to sell until another large order was given.

The cry of the poor—the long, hope­less queues, the untrained cooks help­less to provide for their large families without that which had made up such a large part of their food—was piti­ful. And all the time the West End shops were selling it in fifty-pound lots or less. The Government’s loose effort to enable fruit-growers to pre­serve their fruit was equally unfair. The growers sent in their require­ments, and the sugar was released to the grocer mentioned in the requisi­tion, but without any control over the amount he passed on to the grower. Of four friends, no two received the same proportion of that which they had asked for, the amount varying from fifty to ninety per cent. No one knows what the grocer should have given out. The latest measure in the handling of sugar, to come into force in October, is a form of card supply, but still there is no safeguard that the grocer will sell to his customers their individual shares of the avail­able supplies.

The clamorous protest arising was more than threatening. Lord Devonport accepted the inevitable and re­signed. Lord Rhondda assumed the thankless job. It is typical of Eng­lish public life that only a titled man is considered competent to undertake public work. The war has introduced a Geddes or two; others will have to follow. Particularly unfortunate in the matter of controlling resources is this habit, since these wealthy titled men are so closely concerned in a financial way with the industries and commerce of the country that unpre­judiced outlook is nigh to impossible. Lord Rhondda had made good in his first Government office and in private life, and initiative was not lacking. His misfortune was that he was ap­pointed at a time when public im­patience would not brook delay. With­out time to study the situation and devise methods he was driven to in­stant action. The result was a hun­dred more or less vague promises that seemed to fit in with the demands of the people, and one act only of the immediate future. Profiteering was the bête noire of the people, and on profiteering he came out strong—in word. Thus far there is only the promise that profiteering will be pun­ished by imprisonment. Speculation is to be stopped, how is not apparent. Lord Devonport had already issued orders to that effect in the case of meat without affecting much the price to the consumer. The only definite act which would tend to soothe the people was an obvious expedient. It dealt with the commodity most fa­miliar to the table—bread. Bread was ordered to be sold—some time in the future—at eighteen cents a quartern loaf.

Realizing that the British Isles might be called upon to depend upon their own resources, he turned to the farmer. Land was tilled that had never been broken for centuries, and the farmer became a real producer. If he didn’t, there was a law to take his land from him temporarily. Ploughing was done by tractor, night and day and Sundays. The added crop acreage was expected to amount to millions, but lack of tractors and help and quick co-operation reduced the amount to less than half a million acres. Next year the millions are promised. Allotments sprang up everywhere—vacant lots, golf links, railway tracks, parks. London alone is producing eight hundred extra acres of vegetables. The additional growth has reduced the price of po­tatoes for the moment to less than it was before the war; and the absence of market organization is leaving tons to rot, England was driven to act before she could complete the organ­ization necessary to reap the greatest reward.

The solution does not yet appear. If the submarine continues even its present success, and the measures of the future do not improve substan­tially on those of the past, the British Isles will feel want. Private profits, private shipping, block all the Gov­ernment can do. The controlling in­fluences of supply and demand are non-existent in time of war. With Government interference they lost al­most all their power, in all justice. To continue that power is to exploit the Government of the people at the cost of the people. To-day the old tenet of the economist means nothing more, in the case of importations, than to ask the people, at their own ex­pense, to make trade possible by im­port regulations and transportation protection, and then to expect them to pay the trader according to the volume and expense of that protec­tion. And locally-grown products are directly dependent for price, especial­ly in England, on the available stocks from without.

The stopping of profiteering is a pleasant ambition to talk about but an over-lofty one to anticipate. Pro­fiteering does not end with the grocer and butcher, the wholesaler and ship­per. It has entered into every phase of home life. Only the man in khaki, who assumes all the risk of war, is precluded from it. The workingman, the clerk, the farmer, the thousands of Government officials who have risen with the war—even the Govern­ment itself—are profiting from the war. But the burden is uneven. The workingman of England can present a good defence in terms of compara­tive wage scale, but in terms of total receipt—which is the basis of his liv­ing—he might be called a profiteer. His five pence an hour of pre-war days may have increased only sixty per cent., while living has advanced one hundred; but his week’s envelope contains probably three times—often six and ten times—what it did before the war. The decreased facilities for drink and idleness keep him longer at work, and the additions of bonus and overtime are not infrequently greater than his regular wage.

The next article of this series will discuss the elaborate plans being made in England for the conservation of materials.

Getting the Men

Getting the Men

Part VI serial ‘England in Arms’

From The Canadian Magazine, October 1917.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, August 2016.

Britain, the free! Bri­tain, the democratic monarchy! Britain, the mistress of the seas! Britain, the unconquer­able!

They were sweet-sounding tributes whose title and warranty were never honestly questioned in time of peace. And the British nation had so incor­porated them into its creed that noth­ing within the range of the most imaginative pessimist had for gen­erations cast doubt on their eternal appropriateness. Through one war Britain had struggled with but the superfluity of her energy. Through centuries of peace the world had bow­ed to Britain’s well-deserved reputa­tion.

And then came war—war of the kind that recognizes no reputations, that develops along the ordinary channels of guns and strategy and men. And Britain was forced to re­vise her creed.

In that very revision came the real struggle. Britain, the free, had to reconstruct the meaning of the word. Britain, the democratic mon­archy, had to acknowledge that de­mocracy involved co-operative reality as a prime necessity for the mainten­ance of Britain as mistress of the seas. Britain ceased to be free. That was the bitter pill.

And yet Britain passed from freedom to bondage only in the interpre­tation of those who count nothing to a nation in its extremity. Bondage laid aside its ungrateful mask and be­came union, a great patriotic rally for the dominion of freedom. “Unit­ed stand” was never so vividly demonstrated on the western side of the Atlantic. Freedom assumed its true meaning: the unassailable right to personal liberty so long as it does not infringe on the well-being of the state. Russia has tried the other kind of freedom for a few disastrous months and given the lie forever to the dreams of Socialism.

Born, bottled and bred on the free­dom of the citizen, Britain entered the war as a Crusader. That first hundred thousand passed to France but as the vanguard of the millions that were clamouring to express their loyalty by force of arms against the enemy. The millions trooped to the recruiting offices, turning their backs on their occupations, their businesses, their comfort, their families. Volun­tarism was to prove itself against every test. And for six or eight months it seemed to be succeeding. Faster than they could be trained and armed patriots rallied to the prin­ciples on trial. Great Britain was al­most satisfied—the public part of it.

But there were military, and even political, experts who were not so credulous. Lord Kitchener had an inkling of what faced the nation. The Cabinet, shamed by its own unpre­paredness, trembled. It handed over to the lion of the nation the task of affording voluntarism its greatest op­portunity. What Lord Kitchener could not accomplish in the call to arms was beyond the power of any man in Great Britain. And Lord Kitchener’s millions are a tribute to him and to his country.

But still the sweeping spectacle of Germany’s might in those early months loomed high above Great Bri­tain’s show of resistance. Kitchener appealed as only he could. Posters stared where bills never dared appear before. Huge red arrows on every London street pointed the way to the recruiting stations. The King bec­koned. Women urged and cajoled. The newspapers filled their front pages with petitions to the people. Appeals turned to warnings, then to threats. And the people thought they were hurrying. They saw the long lines before the recruiting booths, the long trains leaving for the front, the vacancies at home. But the authori­ties knew that longer lines must form, longer trains start, more homes be manless. For Germany was still near Paris, was still threatening Calais; and Mesopotamia, Egypt, Gallipoli, Greece were clamouring for fresh ag­gressive battle-fronts.

The Derby scheme was introduced.

It was in this Great Britain re­ceived its first taste of compulsion. The pill was sugar-coated at first. It was not a remedy, but a test. Every young man of military age was asked to report to the nearest recruiting station, not for service at the front, but for the compilation of a national register of fighting power. The sugar coating was very thin. The labour unions saw through it the first day. The entire country understood with­out accusing the Cabinet of falsehood in its declaration of intentions. But Great Britain was patriotic. It was also impressed with the promise that certain favours would be accorded those who attested should necessity for conscription arise. In millions the young men signed their names and ages and answered intimate ques­tions. Lord Derby became recruiting agent extraordinary.

It was because the scheme was put forward as his and superintended per­sonally by him that what obloquy at­taches to subsequent events clings un­justly to his name. Lord Derby car­ried through the idea. Mr. Asquith perverted its expressed aim. The men who walked the streets with the khaki arm-badge as an evidence of their willingness to fight upon necessity were called upon before many months to make good.

Conscription killed its reputation only by its name. Conscription meant force, and personal liberty was the Englishman’s religion. But Great Britain was strong behind the prin­ciple. Organizations sprang up in opposition, of course. There were the so-called pacifists whose hankering for publicity drowns every atom of their common-sense and reason. There were foreign outlaws seeking asylum in England, where they had fled to escape military rule and other pur­suing evils. There were Socialists whose only tangible creed is resistance to authority. And there were cow­ards. The noise they all made in chorus was deafening. Those who ac­cepted compulsion did so in silence; it was one of their virtues. Those who opposed it howled. And Asquith, impressed a little with his own breach of faith, and fully seized of the fate of his party in the event of an elec­tion, made every concession that could be made with any appearance of fair­ness and honesty. A Coalition Gov­ernment was the first necessity. It was at that time indisputable that the party which attempted to enforce conscription might be on the road to hari-kari. And both parties in the new Cabinet lent themselves with re­markable unanimity to concessions. There were elections coming some day.

Ministers of the Gospel were ex­empted from service, some attempt at control being exercised by the stipu­lation that the sect must be recog­nized. There are enough religions in England to reform the universe in this generation—or wreck it. And with exaggerated British respect for conscience conscientious objectors were, freed with the Government’s blessing.

The ministers presented only a small difficulty. But, since a man’s conscience is a more private posses­sion than his garters, there was none on this earth to decide with authority whether the conscience was for tem­porary use or was of that unfortunate stripe that becomes a habit, like drink, or cigarettes. Over the conscientious objector more strife has arisen than had he been forced to assume his share of national defence—his nation, his safeguard against coercion of conscience. His exemp­tion was a political dodge, not British fair play. That is proved by the re­fusal of the House to deprive him of the vote he will not assist in making valuable.

And to prevent the conscription of others whose claims to exemption might be as real if not as spiritual, local tribunals were set up to pass judgment.

Two conspicuously egregious follies have characterized the conduct of the Government in securing the men for the front. One is the brief for these tribunals, the other the recent efforts of the authorities to squirm around the question of trade exemptions. And of the two the refusal farce is the most complete exhibition of of­ficial folly.

The idea at the back of this con­sideration for special claims was be­yond criticism. There must be thou­sands of cases where compulsion would work unpardonable injustice and disaster. Local tribunals seemed to offer the most available court and the least expensive. But the good judgment of such bodies could not have been considered. These tri­bunals were made up of local repre­sentatives of all classes. There were titled men, country squires, mer­chants, and labourers. Theoretically there was no favouritism in the per­sonnel. However, it developed that every class of citizen had his advo­cate on the bench. And that was about all it did mean. Every claim­ant was personally known to one or all of his judges. The merchant re­sisted the conscription of his custom­ers, the manufacturer of his em­ployees, the workman of his fellow workmen, the farmer of his hands. Many of the applicants were in debt to one or more of the judges, and to send them to the trenches meant prac­tically the cancellation of the debts. The tribunals as a body were preju­diced at the start against a duty that meant interfering with the business of the community. Indeed, many of them frankly contended that their chief duty was to protect local in­dustry. The employees of members of the tribunals came before them and pleaded their cases, and while the employer usually retired for the decision, he knew he could trust his fellows as they would trust him when their turns came. Sometimes the members themselves were applicants for exemption. If it was an agricul­tural district, a farmer’s helper was certain of favourable consideration. If it was a manufacturing town manu­facturing became a national necessity. The applicant who had not a keen supporter on tribunal was rare.

Of course, the War Office attempt­ed to exercise some restraint on de­cisions. The military representative might appeal, but if he succeeded the tribunal was likely to go on strike in protest. When Sir William Robert­son was clamouring for more men there were tribunals who “downed tools” for a month at a time; and all that time the cases of hundreds of men hung fire.

Many of the exemptions were laugh­able, had they not been so serious. No occupation or profession escaped the leniency of these personal friends in the seats of the mighty. Pugilists, professional sportsmen, entertainers, labouring men whose only concern was to make enough to spend it in the pubs; clerks, workmen engaged on luxuries, men with nothing more to back their claims than a ready smile, were freely exempted. From hun­dreds of applicants for exemption only one or two would be turned down. A man would he exempted be­cause his brothers were at the front, although he and his brothers had no financial or business connection; and lengthy eulogies would be showered on him for his family’s patriotism. Weeping mothers and importunate fathers drew answering tears—and exemption for their boys. Even in July of this year a father secured exemption for six of his seven sons and one assistant, the other son refus­ing to share the family shame. There is even evidence that the members of a certain secret society were favour­ed.

Sometimes, aware of the weakness of their conduct, the tribunals re­tired into privacy to consider the claims before them.

It was a riot of favouritism, of blindness to the needs of the army, of selfishness. But the tribunals were no worse than the Government—not nearly so bad. Premier Asquith thought to lay the foundation to fu­ture political power, as well as to allay organized opposition to con­scription, by exempting the members of twenty-eight unions. To give face to the act the trades were declared as essential to the war, but others, obvi­ously more closely connected with the struggle, were ignored. And no re­strictions were laid on this exemption through certificated occupations. If a man were a member of the Amalga­mated Society of Engineers—even if he were making nothing remotely con­nected with warfare—he was exempt­ed from service. The unions thus favoured openly advertised for mem­bers on the ground that membership meant exemption. Millions of young men flocked to the munition factories and other “essential” trades, were forced to join the unions, and were immediately exempt. It did not mat­ter that their work a week ago was clerking, or following the races, or systematic loafing. An engineer was simply a member of the union and therefore immune from military ser­vice.

But the Government did not stop there. It added thousands of single young men to its departmental staffs and refused to release them for female or more aged substitutes. As with the unions, the fact that an able-­bodied young man was performing some trivial duty in a Government office was his guarantee against khaki. More, the departments reach­ed out and laid a fondling hand on hundreds of pugilists, and football players, and sportsmen, put them in khaki, and kept them in England, where they were permitted to fight (with their fists), or kick a football, for the honour of the unit with which they were connected. And each de­partment head was his own tribunal.

Of course, there were departments, like the Postal, with a finer record, but all the attempts of the House to enforce respect for their country and its danger failed of complete satis­faction.

The Government defeated its own regulation in ways more open to cri­ticism. Tribunals were ordered by department heads to exempt certain applicants without giving even a rea­son except that they were necessary to the country. They took men whose applications had been refused and placed them in easy Government posi­tions. They opened their doors to the sons of friends without any qualifica­tion save their pull.

So glaring were these inconsist­encies that even the tribunals some­times went on strike against them. While married men approaching the age limit, with large families for the country to keep, classed in the lowest medical category open to the army, and owning large businesses which would be forced to close without their heads—while these men were heartily raked into the army hundreds of thousands of young, single, A1 men were posing as indispensables at a job they had picked up. It was even the case that Government factories were engaging these young men in the place of the older, married men while the tribunals were sitting on their cases.

Some of the newspapers took the matter up, especially the Northcliffe Press. Such a cry was raised in the House that certain departments were forced to release a few of these youth­ful slackers. But every month the fight has to be revived. Most of these young men loudly declare their in­ability to follow their inclinations, but they stand up under the restric­tions with admirable fortitude and cheerfulness.

Not long after the start of the war Lloyd George’s personal wishes on the matter were demonstrated in his contentions for dilution of labour, a task for which he was set apart by his leader. It is one of his greatest accomplishments that he was able to secure the consent of the labour unions, even at the payment of ex­emption. Women were introduced, and to-day they are entering factory shops where none but man ever work­ed before. The relief it gave to a situation whose seriousness will not be told until after the war was more immediate than even its most optimis­tic supporters expected. Indeed, the effectiveness of female labour, its ver­satility, its energy and trustworthi­ness, are partially the cause of the strikes that disgraced England dur­ing early May. The English work­ingman is having it brought home to him that his future is one of real work—with real pay—for the women have, in many instances within my personal knowledge, exceeded after a couple of weeks the output of the men who have been specializing on such work for years.

Dilution freed hundreds of thou­sands of men for the fighting line. And several minor measures affected the same result directly or indirect­ly. For instance, the jury system was suspended in some cases.

But against such saving of labour and freeing of men stands the multi­plicity of officials. Work that might more honestly be done by boys and girls is in charge of uniformed of­ficers and privates. A private firm would be scandalized by the duplica­tion of work and inspection. It de­mands the services of three officials to measure the floor of a Government office to determine what to pay the scrub-woman. The streets of Lon­don are full of khaki-clad officials, ex­empt from fighting, but performing nothing that is beyond the capacity of boys or girls. And for some un­advertised reason certain men, like actors, are permitted to don khaki and continue their usual occupations.

Winston Churchill has stated in the House that there were three and a half men behind the lines for every one in the trenches. And in this Canadian military service, in London or France, is said to be little better.

When Lloyd George rode to power on a platform of aggressiveness, he organized immediately the National Service Department. It was a fine scheme, under an experienced busi­ness man and backed by a thoroughly roused public. It opened a whirl­wind campaign of publicity that car­ried the nation off its feet. It called for a half million men hitherto ex­empt from age or physical condition or otherwise, as substitutes for able­bodied workmen in essential occupa­tions. Sir William Robertson had publicly demanded a half million more men by July lst. Hundreds of thousands responded—and but one from every hundred was placed. As a department fiasco National Service stands alone. It died an unnatural death of violence at the hands of a disgusted people whose ardour has been cooled by this one act of official folly.

Then came the persistent necessity for something of real productive value. The men had to be secured. Thousands might have been combed out of the Government offices, but out in the munition factories were many times the needed number without a claim to exemption except the tech­nical one of membership in specified unions. They were not essential to the output, because it had been proved that women could do better than many of them, and men graded B3 and C3 as well, and those who had gone into the factories since the war were openly exulting in their clever­ness in thus escaping service.

There was encouragement to the Government to take them, because the union officials, finding their authority scorned by this huge new member­ship, longed for a way to free the organization of them. So the Cab­inet announced a new dilution bill whereby those under thirty-one might be taken for the army. But the new union members defeated the measure in a simple manner. Without the acknowledged backing of one union official they organized a strike under their shop stewards. It is history that the Government at first counselled, then threatened, and finally yielded, as everyone knew it would. Politics was never more in the centre of the stage than to-day, with the Liberal party split into two factions and the Unionists watching their opportunity. (And yet coalition has been the sal­vation of the country.)

Since then the policy of the au­thorities has been one of unmitigated submission to a force they fear more than seems to a Canadian to be war­ranted. And to save its official face, as well as to introduce some sense of loyalty into the young shirkers in munition factories who are watching every official move, no public mention of the cowardliness and disloyalty of these young men was breathed in the consideration of the recognized labour unrest until six weeks after the strike was over. Then a couple of indignant members arose in the House and told the truth that was already known to everyone in touch with conditions in the factories.

Defeated once more in its efforts to raise the new army where the oppor­tunities were greatest, the Govern­ment turned to other sources. The original minimum age had already been reduced, first to eighteen years and seven months, then to eighteen. Towards the middle of 1917 the other end of the age scale was tackled and men up to fifty were appealed for. To give the move some appearance of justice, it was announced that these older men would probably be requir­ed only for substitution, but in case they were needed at the Front notice would be given. But there was no exemption loophole provided. The tri­bunal folly was eliminated. Also it had been long suspected that fraudu­lent exemption on the alleged ground of physical unfitness was rife, and the men thus freed were ordered for re-examination. In one district it was discovered that one in every four ex­emptions was dishonest. Legal action was taken against dishonest medical examiners. As was suspected, the numbers of seemingly strong men wearing the badge of discharged sol­diers were large enough to merit in­vestigation. These, too, were ordered up for re-examination.

It was obvious that the Government was attempting to solve the problem by following the smoothest channel. The older men with expensive fam­ilies for the country, the discharged and unfit—everyone who was not organized for opposition—was on the way to service, while millions of the very youths for military life were flaunting their immunity. Where­upon the discharged soldiers organ­ized. First of all there was a spon­taneous and natural protest against forcing re-examination on the obvi­ously unfit, on the nervous wrecks.

And there the Government bowed to popular opinion. And when the case of the discharged soldiers was re-con­sidered a compromise was made ex­empting those who had already served overseas, even though they had once again been passed by the doctors. But still the young men in the muni­tion factories calmly issued their de­mands on threat of strike or decreas­ed production.

Other unions proved their loyalty. There were demands from some of them to clean out their own young men. The South Wales miners, whose record of loyalty follows a fluctuating line, spoke through one of their representatives in the House. They held indignation meetings, at which they called upon the Govern­ment to take the 205,000 unmarried miners under the age of thirty-one.

At the same time London was swarming with aliens, subjects of al­lied countries or of none, who were replacing Englishmen in their jobs. It was estimated that in England were 200,000 friendly foreigners of military age. When the spectacle be­came unbearable and the public anger dangerous, legislation was introduced to force them into the armies of this or their own countries. Of course, the so-called Pacifists and those others whose only meeting-ground is their pro-Germanism, fought in the House of Commons to exempt these people; but the feeling of the House was overwhelmingly against them.

It was at this time was held the notorious Leeds Convention, in early June, an aggregation of Labour and Socialist anti-war, peace-at-any-price advocates who posed as representa­tives of British labour. It has been estimated that thirty-three per cent. of the delegates were Russian Jews, thirty per cent. conscientious objec­tors, and twelve per cent. acknow­ledged pacifists. As their object was solely to end the war to save their own skins or Germany’s they received scant respect from the country. The experiences of Ramsay Macdonald and his friend Jowett will have done more than all the thousands of lec­tures and mobbings they have receiv­ed to show them that there is a limit to human patience.

That is where the man-power pro­blem rests to-day. What will be the solution is not at the moment appar­ent. Some say that the Government prefers to struggle along with what it has until the millions of the United States are available. At any rate, it seems certain that the present Gov­ernment will not coerce the shirkers who have defeated it so easily at every move. It would be hard to blame Great Britain for leaving some of the fighting to the newest ally, and no one would be less likely to protest than the United States, which enter­ed the war after the worst of the strain was over and can never, in any event, suffer as have those who took up the cudgels earlier.

That there should be a problem in a democratic country of finding the men for a war like this is not surpris­ing. It is no contemptuous comment on the loyalty of the British. No other country would have gone so far on voluntarism, no country have given such proof of its patriotism without coercion. But there comes a limit to voluntarism in a war where every man and woman has work to do; and the shirkers stand out more promin­ently than their numbers warrant. Where Great Britain failed was in the loopholes she provided to the shirkers. Without preparation she found the men to block the armies of a country trained and fitted to the last movement and gun. It was only in the last pound of her strength that her manhood failed her. She secured the men for the worst days of the war. And even without the entry of later allies she would have found the men for victory when her back was against the wall.

Freedom is a misnomer in a na­tion’s crisis.

The next article of this series is entitled “The Food Problem”.

The Listening-Post

The Listening-Post and the Despatch-Bearer.

Part V of ‘With Canadians from the Front’

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, February 1917.

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, August 2016.

He was a woeful looking figure when I saw him first—thin, sickly, stoop-shouldered, with a light growth of fair hair in constant rebellion. His white, wan face carried a story I longed to hear. As the kind treat­ment of the convalescent home began to have its effect, he brightened to its influence, his cheeks began to fill, his colour to return, and the misery in his eyes passed into a deceiving in­nocence that covered depths of mis­chief. But always the mere mention of his life in the trenches drove him back to sober thoughtfulness.

He never should have been there at all. Only the sheer grit of him had kept him from the hospital many a time. And when he left us once more for the front there was grit in his last smile. He had not learned to look forward to the bully beef and mud with any greater pleasure; but he knew what was expected of him, and his friends—the very friends who had always taken advantage of his mild ways—would tell you that he had never been found wanting in that.

A Canadian to the tips, he was not born in Canada. Indeed, even when I knew him, he spoke English imperfectly. He was born in France. Perhaps that accounted in part for his willingness to face the fight again as soon as the doctors thought he could, when many a bigger, better lad was adding a touch of limp or cough or a twist of pain when the examining doctor came.

From what level of French society he came is immaterial. His father died when he was very young, and his step-father was cruel to him. At thirteen he ran away. He had heard of Canada even at that age, and it sounded good to him. But the French boats would not take him without his parents’ consent; so he shipped on a Norwegian.

His story of the trip across is a series of brutality worthy of the Ger­mans. His mild manners, I suppose it was, and his immature age made him a butt for the cruel sailors. He was kicked and cuffed. A favourite pastime of the crew was to force him to climb the mast when it was caked with frozen spray; and at every slip they kicked him up again. And then he came to Canada, undergrown, ill-nourished, his constitution under­mined.

Landing first in the Maritime Pro­vinces, without a word of English at his command, he nevertheless found work. From job to job he drifted into the lumber woods. And there he was, where the harshest conditions of life demand the strongest, hardiest frames, when the war broke out.

One would think that such a career would have hardened him to anything the trenches had to offer. Lads from homes of luxury had stood it, most of them with less grumble than comes from those who had always existed beneath the knocks of life. But the little French lad’s constitution had been weakened when he was too young to profit physically from the buffets of his experience. The new kind of exposure told on him from the first. He did not drink, and some of his mates have told me what a pitiful sight he was in the cold, wet dawn, shiveringly refusing his grog, while everyone else was clamouring for the touch of liquid fire that open­ed each day through the cold season.

But to a man they repudiated the thought that the boy was any the worse for it in the long run, certain­ly not in morale. “Whenever there was any particularly dirty job on, V. was the first to volunteer,” they said. “He never funked. He was on listen­ing-post longer and oftener than any­one else in the company. Grit clear through!” And his illness came to him when his perils seemed to be over for the time. “I thought I was going to Heaven,” he breathed to me, in that sentimental way of his, “when I got my first leave.” He nearly did. In England but a day or two, he develop­ed pneumonia—as many another has done. That was how I met him.

Always back in his eyes was a sad­ness, as of looking at pictures he did not like to talk about. But when he did talk I could see a little of what he felt; he described it to me with the simple clarity of a mind that does not make a habit of speaking all it thinks.

It was his listening-post duties of which he was always thinking—those lonesome, terrible, perilous hours of which he had spent more than his share out before the front lines. “Often I used to wish a bomb would fall beside me,” he confided, “and get me out of it. But they never would. Fellows all about me were killed, boys who didn’t want to die, but I always escaped. From Novem­ber when I went in I was never dry. Two or three times I found dry places to sleep, and it was wonderful.” And never a hint that his duties had been volunteered, that he had offered to go out and lie in the mud before the German trenches while his comrades held back.

V.’s battalion had a particularly bad spot in the line. The trenches were shallow; to go deeper was but to wallow in deeper water. The Ger­man line was out across a brutal No Man’s Land where water lay in every depression. Men were drowned there. The trenches were bad; the listening-post was inhuman. And the shiver­ing lad returning from before the German fire had no warm dugout to look forward to. He was never dry.

Listening-post duty is the local spying system of the front lines. Every night No Man’s Land is inhabited by two parties, the patrol squads and the listening-posts. The latter usual­ly go in pairs, their duty to listen to the Germans in their trenches if they can approach close enough, to waylay enemy patrols, to uncover working parties. They are the spies, the door­keepers, the watch-dogs, and alto­gether the uncomfortable ones of the company. They are selected for the things that make a good soldier—steadiness of nerve, intelligence, dis­crimination, knowledge of German quick-wittedness, and endurance. Which does not imply that all on listening-post possess these traits. If they do they are the more valuable.

After dark they crawl out over the parapet, often alone, conscious that their return is uncertain, aware that ahead of them stretches an intermin­able two hours of danger and discom­fort. As close as they can get to the German trenches is their goal—through the German wire barricades if possible. And there they lie motionless, silent, low as the ground will let them, in water and mud. The deepest depression, where the mud and water await them, is their safest resting-place. To be against the skyline is certain exposure. And all the time the nervous German is send­ing up star-shells in search for such as he. He has orders not to shoot—as have all in No Man’s Land at night—save as a last extremity. Three bombs he carries for protection if pressed, and a password for his own patrol partlies who are prowling about. In his hand may be the end of a string attached to a bell in the trench he has left, and by it he can say all he need say in a hurry.

For the rest he trusts to Providence and to the luck of the soldier. If the luck of the soldier is according to his deserts I know there is good fortune in store for such as V.

The patrol party is the listening-post in action. It combines the spy­ing of the other with the beat of the policeman and the destructiveness of the soldier. Those of the regular patrol party are relieved of fatigue duty, but into the hours of darkness they cram thrills and danger enough at times to earn them more relief that they get.

Perhaps you, in your Morris chair to-night, can picture the weird work of the patrol in No Man’s Land. Out there where not a finger dare show in daylight, where any careless bullet from either side may find its billet in him, where every second is a possible encounter with a thousand lurking dangers he cannot see, he prowls about in search of anything of value. He may crawl through the barb-wire before the German trenches and lie listening to the conversation of an enemy who fancies himself secure. He may run suddenly into a dark form, or a score of them, and have to hold his hand until he knows them as friend or foe. If friend there is the password. If foe—well, some quick thinking is necessary first of all. He must not reveal his location to either trench by bullet or bomb, except as a last resort. The knife or the bayonet are the saf­est weapons; failing these, bombs. The scene of a couple of patrol parties throwing bombs indiscriminatingly in the darkness contains all the mystery and excitement and uncertainty of a detective story with the possible solu­tion the death of all concerned. When the patrol is out the trenches they left have orders not to fire towards the Germans; a friend is as vulner­able to a rifle bullet as a foe.

And yet the boys like it when there is no other excitement. There is ac­tion in it, the chance of getting even. There is about it that uncertainty that gives gambling its lure—and then there may be a V. C. To poke around in the darkness with the thrills running down your spine, un­certain what is ahead of you, whether a German, a clamorous machine-gun bullet, a sudden jab from a bayonet, or a six-foot hole filled with water, is more exciting than “playing the pon­ies” or dodging the police for a crap game. It even has its points over being caught in the open when the fog rises and shows you up to a thousand or two of snipers whose only interest in life is your death.

A patrol party usually consists of an officer, a sergeant, and six men, and a connection may be retained with the trenches by means of a bell at each end of the platoon.

Connection between the various parts of the army is vital. That is so obvious that its development has been affected less than any other de­partment by the exigencies of this novel war. Communication between General Staff and army, between army and division, between division and brigade, between brigade and battalion, between battalion and com­pany, between company and platoon, and even between scores of individu­als off in hiding by themselves and their officers. And the guns must never lose touch with the infantry.

There is a system that keeps all these units together, and this war has culled out the useless details and lean­ed on those which have been found not wanting. The backbone of connection is the telephone. There are telephones everywhere on the field of battle, sometimes from far before the front line right back to General Joffre. Every tree may have its tele­phone, every shell hole, every dug-out; and every fence skeleton and hedge is certain to be the trail of wires that direct the conflict.

Wire layers and repairers are a part of every branch of the service, and their work is never complete. But the telephone is not always vocal. Back of battalion headquarters it may be a buzzer, and sometimes in front if the German lines are not too close. The buzzer can be tapped by the enemy more easily. The vocal tele­phone, when within some hundreds of yards of the enemy, is on metallic cir­cuit for the purpose of retaining its secrets. And at the front end of the wire is the signaller.

Of course you have watched with more than ordinary interest the dril­ling in Canada of the signaller before he is sent overseas. You have seen a group of them, each with a pair of flags, wig-wagging to another group across a field. And you have been awed by the swiftness of gesticulation and the certainty of reply. It is there for you to see. So it would be for the enemy if it were in use where there is one.     .

The disillusioning feature of it is that these spectacular evolutions are nothing more than a course of calis­thenics, so far as their usefulness to the present-day line of battle is con­cerned. The signaller is a signaller no longer. His flags are probably somewhere back in England with the rest of the junk of war waste. In the first place battles don’t wait now for an officer in one field to wig-wag to an officer in another field that his guns are cutting up his friends in­stead of his enemies, or that the enemy is about to come over. In the second place signallers are not im­mortal—not in this life, and the supply would run out before a single flag had been raised. The enemy is not the least bit considerate when it comes to passing along messages by anticipated methods.

I am not certain of it offhand, but I should say that not a flag has wav­ed in battle since 1914. It is a pre­paratory exercise for the consumption of open-mouthed civilians, and to con­vince those who enlist for the signal corps that they are signallers.

And the signallers have profited by it as well as the army. There is no straining of eyes, no nervous doubt, no mistake, no exposure. The signaller lies under cover taking the orders of his officer and transmitting them to their destination. And up at the front he has to do his own repairing of wires.

If anyone should guess at the miles of telephone wire that have been used in this war he would probably go mad with the immensity of it. At first the wire was a nice rubbered af­fair that cost so much per inch and when required elsewhere was taken up in order to limit the cost of the British army to $25,000,000 a day—as it is at the time of writing. Then common sense awoke. It struck some­one that service was the thing, not polish; that a wire that could lie ignored when of no further use, at the saving of time and human life, was what this war needed. So they produced an enamelled wire that worked as well without costing enough to make it worth while to send a gang of men to remove it. Now there must be thousands of miles of cheap wire that has served its purpose, kicking about France for peace to collect and sell as souvenirs. It is everywhere over the ground, and everywhere it has been smashed to powder by a thousand guns.

Of course there is other wire. The nicely insulated variety is still used in the rear and removed with the re­moval of the units it feeds. Armour­ed cable is still in use for permanent posts and for headquarters. But where a flag used to deliver a message from the open on clear days in a couple of minutes, a bit of flimsy wire staked to the ground or run through a hedge transmits the same message more surely in a second. And sec­onds count.

There are times when the wires fail—when there is not time for their laying, when movement is too swift to be followed by the wire gang, when the bursting shells make dust of formal communication. It is then man comes into his own—with all the tight places and impenetrable bar­riers into which the carrying of de­spatches throws him.

Orders are carried under these con­ditions by three distinct bodies of orderlies. Back in comparative safe­ty, although still within range of the guns and sometimes under excite­ment, the despatch riders whizz from headquarters to headquarters on motor-cycles. With the distances they have to cover and the large urgency of their reports, speed is im­portant. Between the smaller units behind the lines bicycle orderlies do the work, their course facilitated by the lightness and mobility of their machines.

But while there is a certain glamour thrown on the work of the despatch riders, largely because they are the snobs of the despatch service and roar and rave and rattle about from point to point on mounts whose ef­fectiveness seems to be based upon the noise they make and the speed they can maintain, there is a third branch of the service that performs the really dangerous, unsung work up at the front where the fury of the fight makes wire too mortal, where advance of small units has separated them from their companions, where the extreme pressure of the enemy makes immediate reinforcements and sup­plies necessary to the very life of the struggling men. Those who figure there are the battalion runners.

Were the services of the battalion runners narrated in full there would be books of bravery and sacrifice, of grim perseverance and reckless dar­ing that would pretty nearly discount any other branch of the service. But because these young fellows work at sudden emergency, because they are too busy to demand their dues from the press, because they are few in number and small of size and come into contact only with a few officers, they pursue their imperilled path without a publicity agent.

I have talked to despatch riders whose many months of active service has earned nothing more serious for them than a spill at sixty miles an hour or thereabouts, or a hundred yard acquaintance with a “coal-box.” But the despatch rider—like certain of the Flying Oorp before they have heard the sound of a gun—is primed with a luridness of description that savours of the exhaust of their motor­cycles while carrying perhaps nothing more momentous than an invitation to a brother officer to come over and make up a table.

I have also talked with battalion runners who, having not the capacity for description, treat the most hair-raising experiences as the details of an ordinary day’s work. In fact I have never yet drawn a story from a battalion runner except by the exer­cise of all my “pumping” ability. They are modest boys, trained in a silent, modest school, and their very isolation from the usual trench life deprives them of that ready exchange where the ordinary soldier is cram­med with stock experiences.

Battalion runners seem to be select­ed for their smallness of size, their quickness of foot, their stubborness and determination, and their ability to go on to the end without being swerved aside by the incidents about them. The latter is the main qualifi­cation.. The battalion runner must close his eyes and ears to everything but his destination. His work is not to fight except against the obstacles in his path; and nothing but death must stop him.

Battalion runners are the connect­ing links between units that have be­come separated. They must keep these units in touch, whether across the very mouths of German rifles or backward to the sources of relief and supply. Their orders are simply to get there, using every facility avail­able. Usually they are on foot, sneak­ing along through shattered trenches, crawling from shell hole to shell hole, skirting danger by the merest hair’s breadth to save time—running, creep­ing, lying down until danger is past, in silence and alone looking only to their own resources for the fulfilment of their purpose.

There are stories in my mind of the suffering and grim endurance and persistence of these despatch-bearers, that are almost monotonous in their lack of lurid detail. But anyone with some conception of conditions among the trenches may fill in without diffi­culty. I have heard of battalion run­ners on their way through enemy lines to reach a unit beyond, who were forced to worm along on hands and knees for miles and hours, al­ways within touch of the foe. One runner hid for a week in the remains of a small woods, sneaking out at night to sustain himself on the pick­ings from the dead bodies that lay about. Germans by the hundreds were around him. But he delivered his message at the end—days after it was of any value. Often in their silent passage they meet the enemy on equally silent errands, and fight or run as the occasion or opportunity demands.

And such service is not rendered unscathed. They lie down and die out there where none knows what has happened, their message undelivered and their devotion unrewarded—and they are only casualties. The one thought in their minds is to last out to the moment when they can place the message in the hands they seek. Wounded to death they stagger on, and sink to final rest with the last words of the message on their lips. Even they hide their wounds that they might bear back the reply awaited.

A brave, tireless, defiant, silently suffering band of devoted soldiers, these runners who tempt to their own bodies the wounds they are trying to save their comrades. A modest group whose reward is in duty performed, not in the applause of the casual pub­lic. Some day their historian will earn them their deserts.

The next article of this series is entitled “The Non-Combatants”, which describes the work of the vast number of men in the army who never see the firing-line.