irst, our gentlemen,
our sportsmen, our daredevils, our _preux chevaliers_. To these the
notion of reviling your enemy when he is up; kicking him when he is
knocked down by somebody else; and gouging out his eyes, cutting out his
tongue, hewing off his right arm, and stealing all his money, is
abhorrent and cowardly. These gallants say, "It is not enough that we
can fight Germany to-day. We can fight her any day and every day. Let
her come again and again and yet again. We will fight her one to three;
and if she comes on ten to one, as she did at Mons, we will mill on the
retreat, and drive her back again when we have worn her down to our
weight. If her fleet will not come out to fight us because we have too
many ships, we will send all the odds in our favour back to Portsmouth
and fight ship to ship in the North Sea, and let the bravest and best
win." That is how gallant fighters talk, and how Drake is popularly
(though erroneously) supposed to have tackled the Armada.

*The Ignoble Attitude of Cruel Panic.*

But we are not all _preux chevaliers._ We have at the other extremity
the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the
humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village
burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the
same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German
prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian
troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies
being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the
Kaiser must be sent to Devil's Island because St. Helena is too good for
him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the
dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.
Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the
risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them
to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they
may presently join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling
to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement
comes. But they will not count for much then. Most of them will be
heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of
blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and
most of those who are