uth
slobbered, and two comrades could not hold him still.

These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths ceaselessly. It was a
common, dreadful action. Others sat in the field hospitals in a state
of coma, dazed, as though deaf, and actually dumb. I hated to see them,
turned my eyes away from them, and yet wished that they might be seen
by bloody-minded men and women who, far behind the lines, still spoke of
war lightly, as a kind of sport, or heroic game, which brave boys liked
or ought to like, and said, "We'll fight on to the last man rather than
accept anything less than absolute victory," and when victory came
said: "We stopped too soon. We ought to have gone on for another three
months." It was for fighting-men to say those things, because they knew
the things they suffered and risked. That word "we" was not to be used
by gentlemen in government offices scared of air raids, nor by women
dancing in scanty frocks at war-bazaars for the "poor dear wounded,"
nor even by generals at G. H. Q., enjoying the thrill of war without its
dirt and danger.

Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, during years of
fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were
callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the
boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers
whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops and clergy who
praised God as the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, and had
never said a word before the war to make it less inevitable; the
schoolmasters who gloried in the lengthening "Roll of Honor" and said,
"We're doing very well," when more boys died; the pretty woman-faces
ogling in the picture-papers, as "well--known war-workers"; the
munition-workers who were getting good wages out of the war; the
working-women who were buying gramophones and furs while their men were
in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheerful spirit of
England at war.

Often I was unfair, bitter, unbalanced, wrong. The spirit of England,
taking it broad and large--with dreadful exceptions--was wonderful in
its courage and patience, and ached with sympathy for its fighting sons,
and was stricken with the tragedy of all this slaughter. There were many
tears in English homes; many sad and lonely women. But, as an onlooker,
I could not be just or fair, and hated the non-combatants who did not
reveal its wound in their souls, but were placid in th