patriotism; but, later on, when we happen upon such crude and half-forgotten balladry, much prefer Sergeant Grant's "Battle of Waterloo," with its quaint twelfth stanza:
Here's a health to George our Royal King, and long may he govern,
Likewise the Duke of Wellington, that noble son of Erin!
Two years they added to our time for pay and pension too,
And now we are recorded as men of Waterloo.
or "Sahagun," that "Song of the 15th Hussars sung every December 21st," which begins:
It was in quarters we lay as you quickly shall hear,
Lord Paget came to us and bid us prepare,
Saying, "Saddle your horses, for we must march soon,
For the French they are lying in the town of Sahagun."
In the older wars soldiers' songs sometimes—the more often, the further you go back—came into being much as folk-songs are supposed to have been evolved out of the communal consciousness. The old process was not unknown in the ranks of the Old Army in the first year of the present war, when, to give an example, the following chaffing ditty was sung up and down the trenches, by Territorials as well as by Regulars, when it seemed to them that Kitchener's Army would never arrive after all:
Who are the boys that fighting's for,
Who are the boys to win the war?
It's good old Kitchener's Army.
And every man of them's très bon,
They never lost a trench since Mons,
Because they never saw one.
But in these days, more's the pity, the popular music-hall song has put such spontaneous minstrelsy more or less out of court. It is the tune which counts; hosts have marched to it, and since it is memory-laden and a spell to conjure up sudden visions of the French country-side
