They were getting beyond her control. Since the Boer War there had
been a growing tendency in the Press to under-rate all English effort
and to over-praise to England's discredit the superior pushfulness
of other nations. This melancholy nagging which had for its constant
text, "Wake up, John Bull," had produced the hallucination that there
was something vitally the matter with the Mother Country. No one
seemed to have diagnosed her complaint, but those of us who grew weary
of being told that we were behind the times, took prolonged trips to
more cheery quarters of the globe. It is the Englishman's privilege to
run himself down; he usually does it with his tongue in his cheek. But
for the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the prophets
of Fleet Street certainly carried their privilege beyond a joke.
Pessimism was no longer an amusing pose; it was becoming a habit.

One week of the iron tonic of war had changed all that. The atmosphere
was as different as the lowlands from the Alps; it was an atmosphere
of devil-may-care assurance and adventurous manhood. Every one had the
summer look of a boat-race crowd when the Leander is to be pulled off
at Henley. In comparing the new England with the old, I should have
said that every one now had the comfortable certainty that he was
wanted--that he had a future and something to live for. But it wasn't
the something to live for that accounted for this gay alertness; it
was the sure foreknowledge of each least important man that he had
something worth dying for at last.

A strange and magnificent way of answering misfortune's challenge--an
Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business
as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and
unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out
and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should