everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and that the
business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany had
learned her lesson. I was myself a modest member of the last
school, but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and
I hoped with luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances
approved my progress. Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in
my slow nature, and that I would end by waving the red flag.

Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of
most of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous
in it all. This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission
which I had embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a
fiasco. Sometimes they worried me beyond endurance. When the
news of Messines came nobody took the slightest interest, while I
was aching to tooth every detail of the great fight. And when they
talked on military affairs, as Letchford and others did sometimes, it
was difficult to keep from sending them all to the devil, for their
amateur cocksureness would have riled job. One had got to batten
down the recollection of our fellows out there who were sweating
blood to keep these fools snug. Yet I found it impossible to be
angry with them for long, they were so babyishly innocent. Indeed,
I couldn't help liking them, and finding a sort of quality in them. I
had spent three years among soldiers, and the British regular, great
follow that he is, has his faults. His discipline makes him in a funk
of red-tape and any kind of superior authority. Now these people
were quite honest and in a perverted way courageous. Letchford
was, at any rate. I could no more have done what he did and got
hunted off platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the
streets than I could have written his leading articles.