s warmed to the name. It was not because they hated
Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a
fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the
war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood)
like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would
have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so
in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. "What's
patriotism?" asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in
his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of
their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived
for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to
many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went
back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents
sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws.
The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees,
the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched
them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of
expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under
a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city
and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was
the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the
embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept
his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother's
plants... London! Good old London!... His heart ached for it sometimes
when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No
Man's Land.

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane
a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on
the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the
building, and listened. The men were singing "Auld Lang Syne" to the
accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts,
and the old tune--so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the
war zone--sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the
concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang "God Save
the King." I heard it sung a thousand times or more on r