Ratepayer and the Rights of the Parent working through the
instrumentality of the Best Club in the World have kept their souls and
minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered, with the
thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who
will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus
sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in
some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute
stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and
at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the
subaltern--the son of the school-burking, shareholding class--a slightly
taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the
realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to
keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with
the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical headmaster to use
a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens,
believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."... The major you
see is a man of the world, and very pleasantly meets the grey general's
eye. He is, one may remark by the way, something of an army reformer,
without offence, of course, to the Court people or the Government
people. His prospects--if only he were not going to be shot--are
brilliant enough. He has written quite cleverly on the question of
Recruiting, and advocated as much as twopence more a day and billiard
rooms under the chaplain's control; he has invented a military bicycle
with a wheel of solid iron that can be used as a shield; and a war
correspondent and, indeed, any one who writes even the most casual and
irresponsible article on military questions is a person worth his
cultivating. He is the very life and soul of army reform, as it is known
to the governments of the grey--that is to say, army reform without a
single step towards a social revolution....

So the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to the
shambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that
haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do, against
modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful
and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry
battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever
they come against a sanely-organized army. There