of death, their feeling for these old-timers, who had faced death so often, amounted to hero-worship.  It was good to hear them deriding the caricature of the typical Briton, which had served in their mental galleries as an exact likeness for so many years.  It was proof to me that men who have endured the same hell in a common cause will be nearer in spirit, when the war is ended, than they are to their own civilian populations.  For in all belligerent countries there are two armies fighting—­the military and the civilian; either can let the other down.  If the civilian army loses its morale, its vision, its unselfishness, and allows itself to be out-bluffed by the civilian army of Germany, it as surely betrays its soldiers as if it joined forces with the Hun.  We execute soldiers for cowardice; it’s a pity that the same law does not govern the civilian army.  There would be a rapid revision in the tone of more than one English and American newspaper.  A soldier is shot for cowardice because his example is contagious.  What can be more contagious than a panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated?  Already there are many of us who have a kindlier feeling and certainly more respect for a Boche who fights gamely, than for a Britisher or American who bickers and sulks in comfort.  Only one doubt as to ultimate victory ever assails the Western Front:  that it may be attacked in the rear by the premature peace negotiations of the civil populations it defends.  Should that ever happen, the Western Front would cease to be a mixture of French, Americans, Canadians, Australians, British and Belgians; it would become a nation by itself, pledged to fight on till the ideals for which it set out to fight are definitely established.

We get rather tired of reading speeches in which civilians presume that the making of peace is in their hands.  The making may be, but the acceptance is in ours.  I do not mean that we love war for war’s sake.  We love it rather less than the civilian does.  When an honourable peace has been confirmed, there will be no stauncher pacifist than the soldier; but we reserve our pacifism till the war is won.  We shall be the last people in Europe to get war-weary.  We started with a vision—­the achieving of justice; we shall not grow weary till that vision has become a reality.  When one has faced up to an ultimate self-denial, giving becomes a habit.  One becomes eager to be allowed to give all—­to keep none of life’s small change.  The fury of an ideal enfevers us.  We become fanatical to outdo our own best record in self-surrender.  Many of us, if we are alive when peace is declared, will feel an uneasy reproach that perhaps we did not give enough.

This being the spirit of our soldiers, it is easy to understand their contempt for those civilians who go on strike, prate of weariness, scream their terror when a few Hun planes sail over London, devote columns in their papers to pin-prick tragedies of food-shortage, and cloud the growing generosity between England and America by cavilling criticisms and mean reflections.  Their contempt is not that of the fighter for the man of peace; but the scorn of the man who is doing his duty for the shirker.