gone by, but in the wet trenches or the
hideous No Man's Land between. What were the images they summoned up in
the darkness? Visions of long-familiar homes and long-familiar friends?
And just how were they facing the future? Even as I wondered, voices
rose in a song, English voices, soldier voices. It was not "Tipperary,"
the song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch the words:

"I want to go home!
I don't want to go back to the trenches no more,
Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore,
I want to go home!"

It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery of the desire it
expressed, and thus tremendously gained in pathos. They did want to go
home--naturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing "We won't
come back till it's over, over there!" The difference is that these
Britishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face,
have tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heartsickness and
seasickness are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of the
British army. I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale
of our own army also, but at present the British are holding the fort.
Tommy would never give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste of
it, and his songs reflect his experience. Other songs reached my ears
each night, above the hissing and pounding of the Channel seas, but
the unseen group returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt and
Crecy, of Waterloo, of the countless journeys across this same stormy
strip of water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, and one
wondered whether war were eternal and inevitable, after all.

And what does Tommy think about it--this war? My own limited
experience thoroughly indorses Mr. Galsworthy's splendid analysis of
British-soldier psychology that appeared in the December North American.
The average man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence of
England. The British Government itself, in its reconstruction department
for the political education of the wounded, has given partial denial
to the old maxim that it is the soldier's business not to think but to
obey; and the British army is leavened with men who read and reflect
in the long nights of watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about
conditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of the future.
The very army itself has had a miracle happen to it: