The spectacles had gone.  The lank, round-shouldered figure had filled and straightened.  Suddenly a man had been born.  A soldier, too.  This fellow of the pen and ledger, this very type of the British clerk who had never handled a rifle in his life and didn’t know the smell of powder from eau de Cologne, who had never experienced anything of hardship or even discomfort; whose outlook in life had hitherto never stretched beyond a higher seat at the office desk, to whom the great passions of life were a sealed book—­this fellow passed his shooting and other tests in record time.

He was in France within sixteen weeks of joining the army.

Those were very dark days in England, but the sight of this one young man cheered the chief.  We were arrayed in battle against men who had been trained through all the years of their manhood, the whole course of whose lives had been shaped for this Day.  And we had to meet them with—­clerks!  It seemed hopeless and a mockery.  But when he saw Sydney Baxter the chief realised that often when the spirit is willing the flesh becomes strong; that the British fighting breed was not dead, though the black office coat had misled the German.  How many times have you and I said “he was the last man I should have thought would have made a soldier.”  Well, Sydney Baxter was that last man.  And he made a first-class soldier.  Let this country never forget it.  He, and the thousands like him, outnumbered and outgunned, fought the Prussian Guard, the most finished product of the German military machine, and halted them, held them, beat them.  In equal fight they thrashed them.  Think of it in the light of history.  The greatest and most wonderfully equipped and trained army the world has ever known beaten in fair fight by an army of clerks, schoolmasters, stockbrokers, University men, street waifs, shopkeepers, labourers, counter-jumpers, most of whom did not know one end of a rifle from the other when war was declared.  Sydney Baxter was one of that army.  That is why I am telling his story.  It will make strange and very salutary reading for Prussian arrogance—­some day.

One Young Man on Active Service

CHAPTER IV

ONE YOUNG MAN ON ACTIVE SERVICE

Sydney Baxter was sent with his unit to Rouen.  He writes: 

“We were tightly packed in a small tent at Rouen Camp.  The following morning and afternoon we were busily engaged in being fitted out with extra equipment and ammunition, and so did not have time to look around.  We had great hopes, however, of seeing the city in the evening, but we had to ‘Stand by’ and on no account leave camp.  This was horrible.  The tents were too dark to play cards, we had no reading matter or letters to answer, and once more seemed doomed to an evening of deadly dreariness.  However, we decided to patrol the camp, my chum