If a man has never been taught that he has a country, how the deuce do you expect him to love her—­still less to defend her with his blood?  Our more than damnable governments for the last thirty years have done everything in their power to crush in English hearts the national spirit of England.  God knows I have no quarrel with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.  I speak in no disparagement of them.  Quite the reverse.  In this war they have given freely of their blood.  I only speak as an Englishman of England, the great Mother of the Empire.  Scot, Irishman, Welshman, Canadian, Australian are filled with the pride of their nationality.  It is part of their being.  Wisely they have been trained to it from infancy.  England, who is far bigger, far more powerful than the whole lot of them put together—­it’s a statistical fact—­has deliberately sunk herself in her own esteem, in her own pride.  Only one great man has stood for England, as England, the great Mother, for the last thirty years.  And that man is Rudyard Kipling.  And the Little Folk in authority in England have spent their souls in rendering nugatory his inspired message.

This criminal self-effacement of England is at the root of the peril of the British Empire during this war.

I told you at the beginning that I did not know how to write a story.  You must forgive me for being led away into divagations which seem to be irrelevant to the dramatic sequence.  But when I remember that the result of all the pomp and circumstance of that meeting was seven recruits, of whom three were rejected as being physically unfit, my pen runs away with my discretion, and my conjecturing as to artistic fitness.

Yes, the Major spoke.  Sir Anthony is a peppery little person and the audience enjoyed the cayenne piquancy of his remarks.  The red-tabbed Lieutenant-Colonel spoke.  He was a bit dull.  The elderly orator from London roused enthusiastic cheers.  The wounded sergeant, on crutches, displaying a foot like a bandaged mop, brought tears into the eyes of many women and evoked hoarse cheers from the old men.  I spoke from my infernal chair, and I think I was quite a success with the good fellows in khaki.  But the only men we wanted to appeal to had studiously refrained from being present.  The whole affair was a fiasco.

When we got home, Marigold, who had stood behind my chair during the proceedings, said to me: 

“I think I know personally about thirty slackers in this town, sir, and I’m more than a match for any three of them put together.  Suppose I was to go the rounds, so to speak, and say to each of them, ’You young blighter, if you don’t come with me and enlist, I ’ll knock hell out of you!’—­and, if he didn’t come, I did knock hell out of him—­what exactly would happen, sir?”

“You would be summoned,” said I, “for thirty separate cases of assault and battery.  Reckoning the penalty at six months each, you would have to go to prison for fifteen years.”