There was a splendid response to the call for recruits. The Lord Mayor proudly tells us that over 50,000 of the civil population, about one-fourteenth of the whole, have shouldered the burden of national service. The recruiting boom was quite a spectacular affair. At the beginning a giant thermometer recorded the progress of enlistment. The bulb burst, as did that of a second and far more ambitious instrument.

One of the most notable recruiting efforts has been the sweeping of the “nuts” into non-manual workers' battalions. Sons of manufacturers, and well-to-do professional men, lords of the side-car, tennis club ornaments, pillars of the ball-room. They are good lads all and will make first-rate fighting men, and they will be all the better for a few months' discipline.

The world war seems very remote on a darkening December day, with the Christmas trade and traffic in full swing. A train of new armoured motor-cars and transport wagons trundles by on the first stage of its journey to the front. A battalion of recruits marching through the city and singing to the strains of its band draws the comfortable crowd to the pavement-edge. The most popular “short-cut” in the kingdom over New-street Station railway bridge is all illusion: the station is closed tto all but bona fide travellers to allow a Red Cross train to discharge wounded soldiers bound for the new university building at Bournbrook, now one of the finest military hospitals in the country.