in every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin-hipped,
alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a dazzling sunlight made that
beautiful countryside as bright as a coloured picture post-card, but a
riotous cold gale was blowing; yet all wore cotton trousers that left
their knees as bare as Highlanders' kilts. Above these some had an
sweaters, others brown khaki tunics, from which I gathered that they
belonged to the officers' training corps. They were drawn up on two
lines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim look on their faces
that would certainly have put any Hun to flight. Between the files stood
an unmistakable gipling sergeant with a crimson face and a bristling
little chestnut moustache, talking like a machine gun.

"Now, then, not too lidylike!--there's a Bosch in front of you! Run 'im
through! Now, then!"

The lines surged forward, out went the bayonets, first the long thrust
and then the short, and then a man's gun was seized and by a swift
backward twist of the arm he was made helpless.

"Do you feel it?" asked the officer, as he turned to me. I did. "Up
and down your spine," he added, and I nodded. "Those chaps will do,"
he said. He had been through that terrible battle of the Somme, and he
knew. So had the sergeant.

Presently came a resting-spell. One of the squad approached me, whom I
recognized as a young man I had met in the Harvard Union.

"If you write about this," he said, "just tell our people that we're
going to take that sergeant home with us when the war's over. He's too
good to lose."

IV

It is trite to observe that democracies are organized--if, indeed, they
are organized at all--not for war but for peace. And nowhere is this
fact more apparent than in Britain. Even while the war is in progress
has that internal democratic process of evolution been going on,
presaging profound changes in the social fabric. And these changes must
be dealt with by statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the war
is being prosecuted with the other. The task is colossal. In no previous
war have the British given more striking proof of their inherent quality
of doggedness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in never
falling, but in rising every time you fall. The British speak with
appalling frankness of their blunders. They are fighting, indeed, for
the privilege of making blunders--since out of blunders arise new truths
and discoveries not contemplated in German philoso