equanimity of the British staff in the course of its preparations or of
the French staff, which knew well enough that when the time came the
British Army would not be fastidious about paying the red cost of
victory. Four months later when British battalions were throwing
themselves against frontal positions with an abandon that their staff
had to restrain, the same sources of outside criticism, including
superficial gossip in Paris, were complaining that the British were too
brave in their waste of life. It has been fashionable with some people
to criticize the British, evidently under the impression that the
British New Army would be better than a continental army instantly its
battalions were landed in France.

Every army's methods, every staff's way of thinking, are characteristic
in the long run of the people who supply it with soldiers. The German
Army is what it is not through the application of any academic theory of
military perfection, but through the application of organization to
German character. Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to
initiative, the Germans before the era of modern Germany had far less of
the martial instinct than the French. German army makers, including the
master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and
obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity
and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in democratic
France and individualistic England where every man carries Magna Charta,
talisman of his own "rights," in his waistcoat pocket.

The French peasant, tilling his fields within range of the guns, the
market gardener bringing his products down the Somme in the morning to
Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman--they are France
and the French Army. But the heart-strength and character-strength of
France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. It is