These are roughish traits, are they not?  Sit down by this group of Tommies by the water-hole in the mid-day halt.  They are filthy dirty, poor fellows.  Their thin, khaki, sweat-stained uniforms are rotting on them.  They have taken off tunics and shirts, and among the rags of flannel are searching for the lice which pester and annoy them.  Here is a bit of raw humanity for you to study, a sample of the old Anglo-Saxon breed; what do you make of it?  Are thieving, and lying, and looting, and bestial talk very bad things?  If they are, Tommy is a bad man.  But for some reason or other, since I got to know him, I have thought rather less of the iniquity of these things than I did before.

The day has been fearfully hot, as usual, and they have done a long march.  They were up last night on picket, and have had nothing to eat all day as yet but a biscuit or two and a cup of milkless coffee.  This sort of thing has been going on for months.  They are tired and hungry and footsore.  More than one falls back where he sits and drops into a sleep of utter exhaustion.  But of any serious grumbling or discontent there is no sign.  A few curse at the heat perhaps, but their hardships are mostly a subject for rough chaff and Cockney jokes.  You thought you were roughing it a good deal, but look at the state these men are in.  You gave yourself credit for some endurance, but look at their unaffected cheeriness.  The whole army is the same.  In their thousands, as you see them pass, the prevailing expression down all the swarthy faces is one of unfailing good-humour.  They make no more of their hardships than Sandow of throwing about bars and bells that would crush an ordinary man flat.  It dawns on one, the depth of manhood that is implied in endurance like this.  “We sometimes get licked at first, but we mostly come out all right in the end.”  Tommy’s good-natured face as he sweats it across the veldt gives some meaning to that boast.

In the crowds of his mates in the East End, in crowds of the unemployed and the like, you see the same temper—­a sort of rough, good spirits, an indomitable, incorrigible cheerfulness that nothing, no outward misery, seems able to damp.  In West End crowds (Hyde Park, for instance) you don’t get this.  There are smiles and laughs, as you look about at the faces, but they seem merely individual—­one here, another there.  In the crowd of roughs—­though goodness knows there is little cause for merriment, so far as one can see—­there is a quite different, deeper, and more universal feeling of bluff cheeriness, not put on, but unconscious, as though, in spite of present misery, things were going right for them somehow.  I should say an East End crowd gave one a far deeper impression of animal spirits, of hope and cheeriness, than a West End one.  And it is the same with soldiers.  The officers are fine fellows, but in this point they yield to the soldiers.