-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.
At the end of each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers--tall,
slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats,
with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior
sort of sport.

The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient,
light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as
Dickens and Dumas--and in the same ways!

An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before
of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy Atkins.

"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty
good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment
about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death
shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that.
He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or
glory, at least not in the same conscious way. He'd fight just as well
against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean. He's
just--well, look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental
--they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But Tommy Atkins
--well, he's just playing football!"

The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by
a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and
Rogue.

Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like
stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea,
boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the
German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that
hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the
face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or
whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing:

"Smash the blighter's head!"

There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the
people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles
of racial history and difference. At a Regent Street moving-picture
show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls
driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has
driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a
little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her
companion.

There were pictures of the silk industry