I stand up to kiss the white and delicate hand of the gentlewoman who sends her boy to the war, for its owner knows as well as I do (or ought to) all that is involved in this colossal struggle.  But to the toil-worn, coarse-handed mother I go on bended knees; nothing intellectual comes within the range of her ideas.  Her boy is fighting for England.  She would be ashamed if he were not.  Were she a man she would fight too.  He has gone “with a good ’eart”—­ the stereotyped phrase with which every English private soldier, tongue-tied, hides the expression of his unconquerable soul.  How many times have I not heard it from wounded men healed of their wounds?  I have never heard anything else.  “The man who says he wants to go back is a liar.  But if they send me, I’ll go with A good ’eart”—­The phrase which ought to be immortalized on every grave in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia.

17735 P’V’TE Thomas Atkins 1st god’s own REG’T he died with A good ’eart

So, you see, I looked at this rather silly malade imaginaire of an old lady with whom I was taking tea, and suddenly conceived for her a vast respect—­even veneration.  I say “rather silly.”  I had many a time qualified the adjective much more forcibly.  I took her to have the intellectual endowment of a hen.  But then she flashed out suddenly before me an elderly Jeanne d’Arc.  That to me Leonard Boyce was suspect did not enter at all into the question.  To her—­ and that was all that mattered—­he was Sir Galahad, Lancelot, King Arthur, Bayard, St. George, Hector, Lysander, Miltiades, all rolled into one.  The passion of her life was spent on him.  To do him justice, he had never failed to display to her the most tender affection.  In her eyes he was perfection.  His death would mean the wiping out of everything between Earth and Heaven.  And yet, paramount in her envisagement of such a tragedy was the idea of a public proclamation of the cause of England in which he died.

In this war the women of England—­the women of Great Britain and Ireland—­the women of the far-flung regions of the British Empire, have their part.

Now and then mild business matters call me up to London.  On these occasions Marigold gets himself up in a kind of yachting kit which he imagines will differentiate him from the ordinary chauffeur and at the same time proclaim the dignity of the Meredyth-Marigold establishment.  He loves to swagger up the steps of my Service Club and announce my arrival to the Hall Porter, who already, warned by telephone of my advent, has my little wicker-work tricycle chair in readiness.  I think he feels, dear fellow, that he and I are keeping our end up; that, although there are only bits of us left, we are there by inalienable right as part and parcel of the British Army—­none of your Territorials or Kitcheners, but the old original British Army whose