trogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles
crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of
accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money
poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I
see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of
through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been
there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks
of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the
wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and
at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and
spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy
until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in
the toils. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to
those battle-fields.

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling
newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers
hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception
of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed
to some of us more shameful than defeats....

7

A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of
propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF
OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got
a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and
adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have
been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country
had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War
because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations,
and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every
word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers
that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered
Europe to me, as watching and critical.

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline
and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there
were other p