ve walked
through hell-fire sooner than yielded an inch to Gedge. So much would
scornful defiance have done. But behind all this--and I am as certain
of it as I am certain that one day I shall die--burned even fiercer,
steadier, and clearer the unquenchable fire of patriotic duty. He was
dealing not with a man who had sinned terribly towards him, but with a
man who had offered his life over and over again to his country, a man
who had given to his country the sight of his eyes, a man on whose
breast the King himself had pinned the supreme badge of honour in his
gift. He was dealing, not with a private individual, but with a
national hero. In his small official capacity as Mayor of Wellingsford,
he was but the mouthpiece of a national sentiment. And more than that.
This ceremony was an appeal to the unimaginative, the sluggish, the
faint-hearted. In its little way--and please remember that all
tremendous enthusiasms are fit by these little fires--it was a
proclamation of the undying glory of England. It was impersonal, it was
national, it was Imperial. In its little way it was of vast,
far-reaching importance.

I want you to remember these things in order that you should understand
the mental processes, or soul processes, or whatever you like, of Sir
Anthony Fenimore. Picture him. The most unheroic little man you can
imagine. Clean-shaven, bullet-headed, close-cropped, his face ruddy and
wrinkled like a withered apple, his eyes a misty blue, his big nose
marked like a network of veins, his hands glazed and reddened, like his
face, by wind and weather; standing, even under his mayoral robes, like
a jockey. Of course he had the undefinable air of breeding; no one
could have mistaken his class. But he was an undistinguished, very
ordinary looking little man; and indeed he had done nothing for the
past half century to distinguish himself above his fellows. There are
thousands of his type, masters of English country houses. And of all
the thousands, every one brought up against the stern issues of life
would have acted like Anthony Fenimore. I say "would have acted," but
anyone who has lived in England during the war knows that they have so
acted. These incarnations of the commonplace, the object of the
disdain, before the war, of the self-styled "intellectuals"--if the war
sweeps the insufferable term into oblivion it will have done some
good--these honest unassuming gentlemen have responded heroically to
the great appeal;