searching for the lice which pester and annoy them. Here is
a bit of raw humanity for you to study, a sample of the old Anglo-Saxon
breed; what do you make of it? Are thieving, and lying, and looting, and
bestial talk very bad things? If they are, Tommy is a bad man. But for
some reason or other, since I got to know him, I have thought rather
less of the iniquity of these things than I did before.

The day has been fearfully hot, as usual, and they have done a long
march. They were up last night on picket, and have had nothing to eat
all day as yet but a biscuit or two and a cup of milkless coffee. This
sort of thing has been going on for months. They are tired and hungry
and footsore. More than one falls back where he sits and drops into a
sleep of utter exhaustion. But of any serious grumbling or discontent
there is no sign. A few curse at the heat perhaps, but their hardships
are mostly a subject for rough chaff and Cockney jokes. You thought you
were roughing it a good deal, but look at the state these men are in.
You gave yourself credit for some endurance, but look at their
unaffected cheeriness. The whole army is the same. In their thousands,
as you see them pass, the prevailing expression down all the swarthy
faces is one of unfailing good-humour. They make no more of their
hardships than Sandow of throwing about bars and bells that would crush
an ordinary man flat. It dawns on one, the depth of manhood that is
implied in endurance like this. "We sometimes get licked at first, but
we mostly come out all right in the end." Tommy's good-natured face as
he sweats it across the veldt gives some meaning to that boast.

In the crowds of his mates in the East End, in crowds of the unemployed
and the like, you see the same temper--a sort of rough, good spirits, an
indomitable, incorrigible cheerfulness that nothing, no outward misery,
seems able to damp. In West End crowds (Hyde Park, for instance) you
don't get this. There are smiles and laughs, as you look about at the
faces, but they seem merely individual--one here, another there. In the
crowd of roughs--though goodness knows there is little cause for
merriment, so far as one can see--there is a quite different, deeper,
and more universal feeling of bluff cheeriness, not put on, but
unconscious, as though, in spite of present misery, things were going
right for them somehow. I should say an East End crowd gave one a far
deeper impression of animal spirits, of hope