racters roam in the darkness of night. I asked him if I could show
him the way back to the Hotel Tortoni. "Sir," he said, "I desire to go to
Piccadilly Circus, and if I have any of your impertinence I will break
your head." Two apaches lurched up to him, a few minutes later, and
he went off with them into a dark ally, speaking French with great
deliberation and a Mayfair accent. He was a twentieth century
Falstaff, and the playwright might find his low comedy in a character
like this thrust into the grim horror of the war.

5

One's imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing
called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of
separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and
ideals and habits of mind. There has been too much of the
impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though
it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving
with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech
and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness
and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous
shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane--so that when I met him in a
field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him
he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant
who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and
heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the
melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of
Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on
his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the
Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage
fighting instinct. Soldiers who had been through several battles and
knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of
younger men whose first experience of shell-fire was soul-shattering,
so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.

In the ranks were men who had been mob-orators, and who had
once been those worst of pests, "barrack-room lawyers." They talked
Socialism and revolution in the trenches to comrades who saw no
use to alter the good old ways of England and "could find no manner
of use" for political balderdash. Can you not see all these men, made
up of every type in the life of the British Isles, suddenly transported to
the Continent and thence into the zone of fire of m