and a tin. She had suddenly remembered it was past
her baby's feeding time.

Who won the War for us? It was such folk. They turned in docility, with
no more than a pause, a pause of ignorance and wonder, of dismay they
could hardly conceal, from the accustomed order of their days to form
vast armies, to populate innumerable factories for the making of
munitions of war, and, while their households came everywhere to ruin,
they held stubbornly to the task fate had thrust upon them; yet their
august governors and popular guides, frantic and afraid through the dire
retribution which had fallen on that monstrous European society which so
many of us had thought eternal, abjured and abused the common sort whose
efforts were all that could save us. What did they call the Nobodies?
Slackers, cowards, rabbits, and field vermin; mean creatures unable to
leave their football and their drink. I recall one sombre winter's day of
the first November of the War, when a column of wounded Belgian soldiers
shambled by me, coming out of the Yser line, on the way to succour which
I knew they would not find. The doctors and the hospitals were few. These
fellows were in rags which were plastered to their limbs with mud. Their
eyes had the vacant look of men who had returned from the grave and who
had forgotten this world. The bare feet of some of them left bloody
trails on the road. Others clutched their bodies, and the blood drained
between their fingers. One dropped dead at my feet. I came home with that
in my mind; and the next sunrise, hearing unusual sounds outside, I
lifted the blind to a dawn which was cold and ominously scarlet behind
skeleton trees. I saw beneath the trees a company of my young neighbours,
already in khaki, getting used to the harshness of sergeants, and to the
routine of those implacable circumstances which would take them to Neuve
Chapelle, to Gallipoli, to Loos, to the Somme; names that had no meaning
for us then.

That serious company of young Englishmen making soldiers of themselves
in a day with so unpropitious an opening light did not look like national
indifference. Those innocents getting used to rifles were as affecting as
that single line of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near Compiegne,
where a rearguard of the "Contemptibles" had sacrificed themselves to
their comrades. But one could not be sure. I went to find one who could
tell me whether England was awake to what confronted it. I remembered he