y settle your little
duel as you will, you may shout and sing and jump and riot on the march,
so long as you _march on_; you may lounge about half dressed in any
style as suits you best, so long as you're up to time when the trumpets
sound for you; and that's what a man likes. He's ready to be a machine
when the machine's wanted in working trim, but when it's run off the
line and the steam all let off, he do like to oil his own wheels, and
lie a bit in the sun at his fancy. There aren't better stuff to make
soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless 'em, but they're
badgered, they're horribly badgered, and that's why the service don't
take over there, let alone the way the country grudge 'em every bit of
pay. In England you go in the ranks--well, they all just tell you you're
a blackguard, and there's the lash, and you'd better behave yourself or
you'll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you're a bad lot or you
wouldn't be there, and in course you're riled and go to the bad
according, seeing that it's what's expected of you. Here, contrariwise,
you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests
with yourself whether you won't be a fine fellow or not; and just along
of feelin' that you're pricked to show the best metal you're made on,
and not to let nobody else beat you out of the race like. Ah! it makes a
wonderful difference to a fellow--a wonderful difference--whether the
service he's come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothin'
_but_ a scamp, or as a rascal that's maybe got in him, all rascal though
he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. It makes a wonderful difference,
this 'ere, whether you're looked at as stuff that's only fit to be
shovelled into the sand after a battle; or as stuff that'll belike churn
into a great man. And it's just that difference, sir, that France has
found out, and England hasn't--God bless her all the same.

With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had
won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to
refill his Corporal's chibouque.

"A army's just a machine, sir, in course," he concluded, as he rammed in
the Turkish tobacco. "But then it's a live machine for all that; and
each little bit of it feels for itself like the joints in an eel's body.
Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole crittur goes
wrong--there's the mischief."

* * *

It makes all the differen