So of course I went.  The old lady, propped on pillows in an overheated room, gave me tea and poured into my ear all the anguish of her simple heart.  In an abstracted, anxious way, she ate a couple of crumpets and a wedge of cake with almond icing, and was comforted.

We continued our discussion of the war—­or rather Leonard, for with her Leonard seemed to be the war.  She made some remark deliciously inept—­I wish I could remember it.  I made a sly rejoinder.  She sat bolt upright and a flush came into her Dresden-china cheek and her old eyes flashed.

“You may think I’m a silly old woman, Duncan.  I dare say I am.  I can’t take in things as I used to do when I was young.  But if Leonard should be killed in the war—­I think of it night and day—­ what I should like to do would be to drive to the Market Square of Wellingsford and wave a Union Jack round and round and fall down dead.”

I made some sort of sympathetic gesture.

“And I certainly should,” she added.

“My dear friend,” said I, “if I could move from this confounded chair, I would kiss your brave hands.”

And how many brave hands of English mothers, white and delicate, coarse and toil-worn, do not demand the wondering, heart-full homage of us all?

And hundreds of thousands of them don’t know why we are fighting.  Hundreds of thousands of them have never read a newspaper in their lives.  I doubt whether they would understand one if they tried, I doubt whether all could read one in the literal sense of the word.  We have had—­we have still—­the most expensive and rottenest system of primary education in the world, the worst that squabbling sectarians can devise.  Arab children squatting round the courtyard of a Mosque and swaying backwards and forwards as they get by heart meaningless bits of the Koran, are not sent out into life more inadequately armed with elementary educational weapons than are English children.  Our state of education has nominally been systematised for forty-five years, and yet now in our hospitals we have splendid young fellows in their early twenties who can neither read nor write.  I have talked with them.  I have read to them.  I have written letters for them.  Clean-cut, decent, brave, honourable Englishmen—­not gutter-bred Hooligans dragged from the abyss by the recruiting sergeant, but men who have thrown up good employment because something noble inside them responded to the Great Call.  And to the eternal disgrace of governments in this disastrously politician-ridden land such men have not been taught to read and write.  It is of no use anyone saying to me that it is not so.  I know of my own certain intimate knowledge that it is so.

Even among those who technically have “the Three R’s,” I have met scores of men in our Wellingsford Hospital who, bedridden for months, would give all they possess to be able to enjoy a novel—­ say a volume of W. W. Jacobs, the writer who above all others has conferred the precious boon of laughter on our wounded—­but to whom the intellectual strain of following the significance of consecutive words is far too great.  Thousands and thousands of men have lain in our hospitals deprived, by the criminal insanity of party politicians, of the infinite consolation of books.