ses don't damage us vitally
(which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, why
that blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the
breeze.

It is because the quality of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic will
get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive
the inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a cool
impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That
gives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humour
of the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder at
one more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but a
little of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in mean
streets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, the
sons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, the
haughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and the
perplexity of their scheming, make a general mess of the world.
Forthwith in a panic they cry, "Calamity cometh!"

Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their low
worth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job of
restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about
it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it.
If they don't do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and
without complaint upon the wreckage wilfully made of generations of
such labour as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it
habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend
the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos. A hopeless task;
but they continue at it unmurmuring, giving their bodies without stint,
as once they gave their labour, to the fields and the sea. And some day
the planet will get back to its old place under the sun; but not for
them, not for them.

A Nobody never seems to know anything, but by the grace of God he gets
there just the same. I was not far from Ypres and the line of the Yser
during the first battle for the Channel ports. Do you know how near we
were to the edge of the precipice not long before that Christmas? We
were on the verge. We were nearly over. I knew it then. So when, later
still, I used to meet in France an enigmatic, clay-coloured figure with
a visage seamed with humorous dolours, loaded with pioneering and
warlike implements, rifles, knives, tin hats, and gas masks, I alwa