The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a continental people still cherishing old traditions of nationality, and the military training which is compulsory for all young men of average health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an island people protected by the sea.  They know that they have been born of women for one primary object—­to fight when the time comes in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from some other country and race.  At least that is the lesson taught them from first to last in the schools and in the national assemblies, and there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a next-door neighbour may be replaced by friendship and common interests.

The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to join the Army.  Their hearths and homes were not in immediate danger.  They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon English soil.  Their women were safe.  Their property, bought on the hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot.  They could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of cards, and burying their babies.  The British Expeditionary Force which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going out to foreign fields for a great adventure.

2

In France there were no such illusions.  As soon as war was imminent the people thought of their frontiers, and prayed God in divers ways that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been answered.  Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out, with his own body, the inrushing tide of German troops.  The memory of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.

I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I wandered about France.  In the north, nearest to the enemy, and along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy’s troops.  It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their women and children.  It made the most callous man pitiful when he saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of overhanging gables.