e expedition they sent out to China was kept
waiting for a month at Tientsin before the men could start for
Paoting-fu, owing to the non-arrival of some essentials of their
equipment.

Far be it from me to think of posing as a military expert or a sort of
composite military _attache_ to the allied forces. I speak merely as
an observant outsider. In riding to hounds one soon learns the men one
would select to ride against the pick of another pack. One feels in
his "innards" the man he would like to go tiger-shooting with,
although it would be another matter to put down his reasons in
writing, and much more so with soldiers in the field.

From what I have seen in South Africa and China, I feel and know
it--luminously know it in the marrow of my intelligence--that for that
South African job, if it were to be done over again, I would select
the British; that they have done, not alone as well, but better than
any other nation would have done. Many things might have been done
better. But apart from the question of transport, when I saw the
others there were everywhere signs of their probable failures being
infinitely more numerous.

There are only two armies that, granted the possibility of their being
landed in South Africa, could have conceivably tackled the job. These
are the Japanese and the Germans. The Japs would probably have failed
from their want of efficient mounted infantry or cavalry; the
beer-blown Germans would have been worn down by men of better physical
training. The war-knowledgeable brain, looking out through spectacled
eyes, would droop tired in its physical limber until it was brought
on a level with the less scientific but more practical weapon of the
polo-playing, cricketing, footballing British officer.

The Chinese had reached that ideal which we, at the end of the past
century, were making an initial attempt to attain to in the calling
together of the Hague Conference. For they had reached the stage of
advanced development where the pen is really mightier than the
sword--where the highest class in the community is that of the
scholar, the next that of the man who tills the soil, and the last
that of the man whose occupation it is to kill his fellow-man. Thus
the Orientals were naturally at the mercy of the Western countries,
the largest expenditure of whose revenue is absorbed by the cost of
killing-machines and men to work them.

The Chinese have a saying that, as the best iron is not made int