one hand or humble Galahads on the other. But whatever may have been the
case before the war, all the armies of Europe are now alike in this,
that they are composed of civilians who merely happen to have adopted a
certain garb for the performance of a certain job--and, be it remarked,
a temporary job. That garb has not reduced the citizens, who have the
honour to wear it, to a monotonous level either of intelligence or of
conduct: nor even of opinions about the war itself. I have had
fire-eaters in my ward who breathed the sentiments of _John Bull_ and
the _Evening News_, and I have had pacifists (they seemed to have fought
no less bravely) who, week by week, read and approved Mr. Snowden in the
_Labour Leader_; I have had Radicals and Tories, and patients who cared
for neither party, but whose passion was cage-birds or boxing or amateur
photography; I have had patients who were sulky and patients who were
bright, patients who were unlettered and patients who were educated,
patients who could hardly express themselves without the use of an
ensanguined vocabulary and patients who were gently spoken and
fastidious. Each of them was Tommy Atkins--the inanely smirking hero of
the picture-paper and the funny paragraph. Neither his picture nor the
paragraph may be positively a lie, and yet, when the arm-chair dweller
chucklingly draws attention to them, I am tempted to relapse into
irreverence and utter one or other (or perhaps both) of two phrases
which T. Atkins is himself credited with using _ad nauseam_--"Na-poo"
and "I _don't_ think."

When I assert--as I do unhesitatingly assert--that no one could work in
a war-hospital ward for any length of time without an ever-deepening
respect and fondness for Tommy Atkins, it is the same thing as asserting
that the respect and fondness are evoked by close contact with one's
countrymen: nothing more nor less. A hospital ward is a haphazard
selection of one's fellow-Britons: the most wildly haphazard it is
possible to conceive. And the pessimistic cynic who, after a sojourn in
that changing company for a month or two can still either generalise
about them or (if he does) can still not acknowledge that in the mass
they are amazingly lovable, is beyond hope. The war has taught its
lessons to us all, and none more important than this. For myself I
confess that I never knew before how nice were nine out of ten of the
individuals with whom I sat silent in trains, whom I glanced at in
bu