always got to have the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or it’s all up with you; you’re that tormented about little things that you get riled and kick the traces before the great ’uns come to try you.  There’s a lot of lads would be game as game could be in battle—­aye, and good lads to boot, doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to anything like war—­that are clean drove out of the service in time o’ peace, along with all them petty persecutions that worry a man’s skin like mosquito-bites.  Now here they know that, and Lord! what soldiers they do make through knowing of it!  It’s tight enough and stern enough in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all through the campaigning; but that don’t grate on a fellow; if he’s worth his salt he’s sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he’s to go to hell at double-quick-march, and mute as a mouse, if his officers see fit to send him.  There ain’t better stuff to make soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless ’em!  But they’re badgered, they’re horribly badgered; and that’s why the service don’t take over there, let alone the way the country grudge ’em every bit of pay.  In England you go in the ranks—­well, they all just tell you you’re a blackguard, and there’s the lash, and you’d better behave yourself or you’ll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you’re a bad lot or you wouldn’t be there, and in course you’re riled and go to the bad according, seeing that it’s what’s expected of you.  Here, contrariwise, you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests with yourself whether you won’t be a fine fellow or not; and just along of feeling that you’re pricked to show the best metal you’re made on, and not to let nobody else beat you out of the race, like.  Ah! it makes a wonderful difference to a fellow—­a wonderful difference—­whether the service he’s come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothing but a scamp, or as a rascal that’s maybe got in him, all rascal though he is, the pluck to turn into a hero.  And that’s just the difference, sir, that France has found out, and England hasn’t—­God bless her, all the same!”

With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal’s pipe.

“An army’s just a machine, sir, in course,” he concluded, as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco.  “But then it’s a live machine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel’s body.  Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature goes wrong—­there’s the mischief.”

Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung full-length on the skins.

“I dare say you are right enough.  I knew nothing of my men when—­when I was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what you say.  Yet—­fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible blackguards!”