At the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square, tragedy bared its broken
teeth and mouthed at me. We had reached the stage at which we had
become intensely patriotic by the singing of songs. A beautiful
actress, who had no thought of doing "her bit" herself, attired as
Britannia, with a colossal Union Jack for background, came before the
footlights and sang the recruiting song of the moment,

"We don't want to lose you
But we think you ought to go."

Some one else recited a poem calculated to shame men into immediate
enlistment, two lines of which I remember:

"I wasn't among the first to go
But I went, thank God, I went."

The effect of such urging was to make me angry. I wasn't going to be
rushed into khaki on the spur of an emotion picked up in a music-hall.
I pictured the comfortable gentlemen, beyond the military age, who had
written these heroic taunts, had gained reputation by so doing, and
all the time sat at home in suburban security. The people who recited
or sung their effusions, made me equally angry; they were making
sham-patriotism a means of livelihood and had no intention of doing
their part. All the world that by reason of age or sex was exempt from
the ordeal of battle, was shoving behind all the rest of the world
that was not exempt, using the younger men as a shield against his own
terror and at the same time calling them cowards. That was how I felt.
I told myself that if I went--and the _if_ seemed very remote--I
should go on a conviction and not because of shoving. They could hand