is war to give us immortal portraits of a twentieth-
century Falstaff, with a modern Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph--what a
human comedy would be there in the midst of all this tragedy in
France and Flanders, setting off the fine exalted heroism of all those
noble and excellent men who, like the knights and men-at-arms of
Henry at Agincourt, thought that "the fewer men the greater share of
honour," and fought for England with a devotion that was careless of
death.

After the British retreat from Mons, when our regular troops realized
very rapidly the real meaning of modern warfare, knowing now that it
was to be no "picnic," but a deadly struggle against great odds, and a
fight of men powerless against infernal engines, there came out to
France by every ship the oddest types of men who had been called
out to fill up the gaps and take a share in the deadly business. These
"dug-outs" were strange fellows, some of them. Territorial officers
who had held commissions in the Yeomanry, old soldiers who had
served in India, Egypt, and South Africa, before playing interminable
games of chess in St. James's Street, or taking tea in country
rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial
schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned
voices which could recite a passage from Ovid with cultured diction;
purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and
apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once
"gone through the Guards," before spending their week-ends at
Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or
Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by
their martial manners.

The Red Cross was responsible for many astounding representatives
of the British race in France, and there were other crosses--purple,
green, blue, and black--who contributed to this melodrama of mixed
classes and types. Benevolent old gentlemen, garbed like second-
hand Field Marshals, tottered down the quaysides and took the
salutes of startled French soldiers with bland but dignified
benevolence. The Jewish people were not only generous to the Red
Cross work with unstinted wealth which they poured into its coffers,
but with rich young men who offered their lives and their motor-cars in
this good service--though the greater part of them never went nearer
to the front (through no fault of their own) than Rouen or Paris, where
they spent enormous sums of money