stuff." He doesn't get it even from Kipling; Thomas Hardy's "Song of
the Soldiers" leaves him cold. He wants no epic stanzas, no heroic
periods. What he asks for is something simple and romantic, something
about a girl, and home, and the lights of London--that goes with a swing
in the march and awakens tender memories when the lilt of it is wafted
at night along the trenches.

And so "Tipperary" has gone with the troops into the great European
battlefields, and has echoed along the white roads and over the green
fields of France and Belgium.

On the way to the front the progress of our soldiers was made one long
fête: it was "roses, roses, all the way." In a letter published in _The
Times_, an artillery officer thus describes it:

"As to the reception we have met with moving across country it has been
simply wonderful and most affecting. We travel entirely by motor
transport, and it has been flowers all the way. One long procession of
acclamation. By the wayside and through the villages, men, women, and
children cheer us on with the greatest enthusiasm, and every one wants
to give us something. They strip the flower gardens, and the cars look
like carnival carriages. They pelt us with fruit, cigarettes, chocolate,
bread--anything and everything. It is simply impossible to convey an
impression of it all. Yesterday my own car had to stop in a town for
petrol. In a moment there must have been a couple of hundred people
round clamoring; autograph albums were thrust in front of me; a perfect
delirium. In another town I had to stop for an hour, and took the
opportunity to do some shopping. I wanted some motor goggles, an
eye-bath, some boracic, provisions, etc. They would not let me pay for a
single thing--and there was lunch and drinks as well. The further we go