during a terrific bombardment.  Trees are falling, buildings crumbling, the landscape heaving, and Bert says, “Alf—­we’ll miss this old war wen it’s over!” As the shells strike nearer and nearer and a great crater yawns at their feet they crawl into it, are all but buried alive by the dirt from another shell, and Bert exclaims, “Say, Alf, scare me—­I got the ’iccoughs!” And so it goes for a whole evening, while Bert, making love to an interminable string of girls at each place where he is billeted at the front, gives away scores of precious lockets with his mother’s hair in them, and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, to make his cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of his wife at home who keeps a “pub”!

The prohibitionist in America would probably insist that she keep a soda fountain or a woman’s exchange; but no other alterations would be needed to get the play over the footlights in any English speaking town on the globe.

The British soldiers crowd the house where “The Better ’Ole” is given, but their friends don’t like it.  The raw rollick of the game with death, which is really Shakespearean in its directness and its horse play—­like the talk of the soldiers in “Henry IV” or the chaffing of the grave-diggers in “Hamlet,” or the common people in any of Shakespeare’s plays, offends the British home-staying sense of propriety, and old ladies and gentlemen write to the Times about it.  But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl their approval.

Curiously enough in musical programs one finds no prejudice against German music in London as one finds it in Paris.  To get Beethoven in Paris one had to lower the windows, close the shutters, pull down the shades and pin the curtains tight.  At the symphony concerts in London one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wagner, who is almost modern in his aggressive Teutonism.  But the English have little music of their own, and so long as they have to be borrowing they seem to borrow impartially of all their neighbours, the French, the Slavs, the Germans, and the Italians.  Indeed, even when British opinion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Symphony Orchestra put in an afternoon with Tschaicovsky’s Fourth Symphony.  And yet if, in a few months we could form even a vague notion of the public minds of England, and of France, one might say that England seemed more implacable than France.  In France, where one heard no music but French and Italian music in the concerts, at the parks, in opera, one heard a serious discussion going on among school teachers about the history to be taught after the war.

Said one side:  “Let’s tell the truth about this war and its horrors.  Let’s tell of murdered women and children, of ravished homes, of pillaged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down to their very milestones!  Let’s tell how German rapacity for land began the war, and kept it up to its awful end.”

Says the other side:  “Germany is our permanent neighbour.  Our children will have to live with Germany, and our children’s children to the end of time.  War is a horrible thing.  Hate breeds war.  Why not then let the story of this war and its barbarities die with this generation?  Why should we for ever breed hate into the heart of our people to grow eternally into war?”