weeks of the war. A staff
motor-car had run over him on the road.

"I think the driver of the car was careless," he said mildly, as if he
were giving a gentle reproof to a student.

By contrast, he had reason to be thankful for his lot. Looked after by a
brave man attendant in another room were the wounded who were
too horrible to see; who must die. Then, in another, you had a picture
of a smiling British regular, with a British nurse and an Englishwoman
of Calais to look after him. They read to him, they talked to him, they
vied with each other in rearranging his pillows or bedclothes. He was
a hero of a story; but it rather puzzled him why he should be. Why
were a lot of people paying so much attention to him for doing his
duty?

In the cavalry, he had been separated from his regiment on the
retreat from Mons. Wandering about the country, he came up with a
regiment of cuirassiers and asked if he might not fight with them. A
number of the cuirassiers spoke English. They took him into the
ranks. The regiment went far over on the Marne, through towns with
French names which he could not pronounce, this man in khaki with
the French troopers. He was marked. C'est un Anglais! People
cheered him and threw flowers to him in regions which had never
seen one of the soldiers of the Ally before.

Yes, officers and gentlemen invited him to dine, like he was a
gentleman, he said, and not a Tommy, and the French Government
had given him a decoration called the Legion of Honour or something
like that. This was all very fine; but the best thing was that his own
colonel, when he returned, had him up before his company and made
a speech to him for fighting with the French when he could not find
his own regiment. He was supremely happy, this Tommy. In waiting
Calais one might witness about all the emotions and contrasts of war
--and many which one does not find at the front.

VI
In Germany

Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first
day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of
the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were
giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the
same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were born in the
same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in
this vicious circle of thought?

My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for
being brief, and