“How do they fight?”

“They take a bit of beating, do the Boches!”

“So you call them Boches!”

“Yes.  They don’t like that.  But sometimes we call them Allemands, which is Germans in French.  Oh, we’re getting quite French scholars!”

“They’re good soldiers.  Not many tricks they’re not up to.  But in my opinion they’re overdoing the hate.  You can’t keep up to your work on hate, sir.  I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too.”

“Still, you would like the war over?  You’d like to go home?”

They certainly would.  Back to the barracks, out of the trenches!  They certainly would.

“And call it a draw?”

“Call it a draw, now!  Call it a draw, after all we’ve been through------”

“Spring is coming.  The ground will dry up and it will be warm.”

“And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in August, we tell the Boches.”

“Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees, or whatever those mountains are, too.  I read they’re all covered with snow in winter.”

It was good, regular soldier talk, very “homey” to me.  As you will observe, I have not elided the h’s.  Indeed, Tommy has a way of prefixing his h’s to the right vowels more frequently than a generation ago.  The Soldiers Three type has passed.  Popular education will have its way and induce better habits.  Believing in the old remedy for exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum every day to the men.  But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child’s play.  So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.

Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism.  He fights because he is paid and it is his business.  That is an insinuation.  Tommy doesn’t care for the “hero stuff,” or for waving flags and speechmaking.  Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of thing kills.  His weapons are bullets.  To put it cogently, he is fighting because he doesn’t want any Kaiser “in his.”

Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the editorials and the recruiting campaign?  Is not that what England and France are fighting for?  It seems to me that Tommy’s is a very practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the Germans.

“Would you like a Boche helmet for a souvenir, sir?” asked a soldier who appeared on the outer edge of the group.  He was the small, active type, a British soldier with the elan of the Frenchman.  “There are lots of them out among the German dead “—­the unburied German dead who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle.  “I’ll have one for you on your way back.”