ntry, regulars and
Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor
among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were
drinking and drunk. They clinked glasses and pledged each other in
French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "Hell to the Kaiser!"
and "a bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road
stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of
a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled
the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed
that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he
had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his
blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace. The French
soldier greeted these sentiments with a "Bravo, mon vieux!" not
understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell
across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken glass.

"Serve him damn well right!" said a sergeant to whom I had been
talking. Like many other English soldiers here who had been fighting
for ten days in retreat, he had kept his head, and his heart.

"We've been at it night and day," he said. "The only rest from fighting
was when we were marching with the beggars after us."

He spoke of the German army as "a blighted nation on the move."

"You can't mow that down. We kill 'em and kill 'em, and still they
come on. They seem to have an endless line of fresh men. Directly
we check 'em in one attack a fresh attack develops. It's impossible to
hold up such a mass of men. Can't be done, nohow!"

This man, severely wounded, was so much master of himself, so
strong in common sense that he was able to get the right perspective
about the general situation.

"It's not right to say we've met with disaster," he remarked. "Truth's
truth. We've suffered pretty badly--perhaps twelve per cent, of a
battalion knocked out. But what's that? You've got to expect it
nowadays. 'Taint a picnic. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up--
wiped clean out, if you like? That don't mean defeat. While one
regiment suffered another got off light."

And by the words of that sergeant of the Essex Regiment I was
helped to see the truth of what had happened. He took the same
view as many officers and men to whom I had spoken, and by
weighing up the evidence, in the light of all that I had seen and heard,
and with the assistance of my friend the Philosopher--whose wisdom
shone brigh