k?" "Yes, I
suppose so, father."

3

So when the war came these young men who had been gazetted six
months or so before went out to France as most men go to do their
job, without enthusiasm, but without faltering, in the same matter-of-
fact way as a bank clerk catches the 9.15 train to the city. But death
might be at the end of the journey? Yes. Quite likely. They would die
in the same quiet way. It was a natural incident of the job. A horrid
nuisance, of course, quite rotten, and all that, but no more to be
shirked than the risk of taking a toss over an ugly fence. It was what
this young man had been born for. It was the price he paid for his
caste.

There were some undercurrents of emotion in the British army not to
be seen on the surface. There had been private dramas in private
drawing-rooms. Some of the older men had been "churned up," as
they would say, because this sudden war had meant a leave-taking
from women, who would be in a deuce of a fix if anything happened
to certain captains and certain majors. Love affairs which had been
somewhat complicated were simplified too abruptly by a rapid
farewell, and a "God bless you, old girl. ... I hate to leave you with
such ragged ends to the whole business. But perhaps after all it's a
way out--for both of us. Eh?" The war offered a way out for all sorts of
men with complicated lives, with debts that had been rather a worry,
and with bills of folly that could not be paid at sight, and with skeletons
in the cupboard rattling their bones too loudly behind the panels. Well,
it was a case of cut and run. Between the new life and the old there
would be no bridge, across which a woman or a ghost could walk.
War is always a way of escape even though it be through the dark
valley of death.

Nothing of this private melodrama was visible among those men who
came to France. When they landed at Boulogne there was no visible
expression on faces which have' been trained to be expressionless.
At Rouen, at Le Mans, at St. Omer, and many other towns in France I
watched our British officers and tried to read their character after
getting a different point of view among the French troops. Certainly in
their way they were magnificent--the first gentlemen in the world, the
most perfect type of aristocratic manhood. Their quietude and their
coldness struck me as remarkable, because of the great contrast in
the character of the people around them. For the first time I saw the
qual