was a quiet observer, that he knew what allowance to make for those
patriotic newspapers which so early were holding up in ruinous caricature
their country and their countrymen for the world to see and to scorn. He
was a scholar, he was a Socialist and a pacifist, he had a sense of
humour to keep him balanced. But he had gone. He had enlisted; and he is
dead.

It was a common experience. From the day the Germans entered Belgium a
dumb resolution settled on our Nobodies. They did not demonstrate. They
made long silent queues at the recruiting offices. It is true those
offices were not ready for them and turned them away; and when by sheer
obstinacy they got into the Army they were put into concentration camps
that were as deadly as battle. That did not daunt them, nor turn them
from their purpose, whatever that was, for they never said; and the
newspapers, by tradition, had no time to find out, being devoted to the
words and activities of the Highly Important. We therefore knew nothing
of the munition factories that were springing up magically, as in a
night, like toadstools, all over the country, and were barely aware that
for some mysterious reason the hosts of the enemy were stopped dead on
the road to Calais. Whose work was all this? But how should we know? Who
can chronicle what Nobody does?

Sometimes there was a hint. Once again, when I returned from France in
1916, unhappy with a guess at what the future would be like, I learned
that our workers were not working. They were drinking. They had been
passionately denounced by the Great and Popular, and our Press was forced
to admit this disastrous crime to the world, for fidelity to the truth is
a national quality. I went to an engineer who would know the worst, and
would not be afraid to tell me what it was. I found him asleep in his
overalls, where he had dropped after thirty-six hours of continuous duty.
Afterwards, when his blasphemous indignation over profiteers,
politicians, and newspapers had worn itself out, he told me. His men,
using dimmed lights while working on the decks of urgent ships, often
forced to work in cramped positions and in all weathers, and while the
ship was under way to a loading berth, with no refreshment provided
aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances from home, were still
regarded by employers in the old way, not as defenders of their country's
life, but as a means to quick profits, against whom the usual debasing
tricks of eco