tting of certain easy vices, but not of treachery, or cowardice, or
corruption.

They had such good form, these young men who had come out to a
dirty devilish war. It was enormously good to hear them talking to
each other in just the same civil, disinterested, casual way which
belongs to the conversational range of St. James's Street clubs. Not
once--like French soldiers--did they plunge into heated discussions
on the ethics of war, or the philosophy of life, or the progress of
civilization, or the rights of democracies. Never did they reveal to
casual strangers like myself--and hundreds of French soldiers did--
the secret affections of their hearts, flowing back to the women they
had left, or their fears of death and disablement, or their sense of the
mystery of God. Not even war, with its unloosing of old restraints, its
smashing of conventionalities, could break down the code of these
young English gentlemen whose first and last lessons had been
those of self-concealment and self-control.

In England these characteristics are accepted, and one hardly thinks
of them. It is the foreigner's point of view of us. But in France, in war
time, in a country all vibrant with emotionalism, this restraint of
manner and speech and utter disregard of all "problems" and
mysteries of life, and quiet, cheerful acceptation of the job in hand,
startled the imagination of Englishmen who had been long enough
away from home to stand aloof and to study those officers with a
fresh vision. There was something superb in those simple, self-
confident, normal men, who made no fuss, but obeyed orders, or
gave them, with a spirit of discipline which belonged to their own
souls and was not imposed by a self-conscious philosophy. And yet I
could understand why certain Frenchmen, in spite of their admiration,
were sometimes irritated by these British officers. There were times
when the similarity between them, the uniformity of that ridiculous little
moustache on the upper lip, the intonation of voices with the peculiar
timbre of the public school drawl, sound to them rather tiresome.
They had the manners of a caste, the touch of arrogance which
belongs to a caste, in power. Every idea they had was a caste idea,
contemptuous in a civil way of poor devils who had other ideas and
who were therefore guilty--not by their own fault of course--of
shocking bad form. To be a Socialist in such company would be
worse than being drunk. To express a belief in