"we treat each case on its merits!"

One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by our Italian Red Cross work.

"Here," he said, "are sixty or seventy young Englishmen, all fit for
military service.... Of course they go under fire, but it is not like
being junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them has been killed
or wounded."

He reflected. "One, I think, has been decorated," he said....

My French and Italian are only for very rough common jobs; when it came
to explaining the Conscientious Objector sympathetically they broke
down badly. I had to construct long parenthetical explanations of
our antiquated legislative methods to show how it was that the
"conscientious objector" had been so badly defined. The foreigner does
not understand the importance of vague definition in British life.
"Practically, of course, we offered to exempt anyone who conscientiously
objected to fight or serve. Then the Pacifist and German people started
a campaign to enrol objectors. Of course every shirker, every coward and
slacker in the country decided at once to be a conscientious objector.
Anyone but a British legislator could have foreseen that. Then we
started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors about their _bona
fides._ Then the Pacifists and the Pro-Germans issued little leaflets
and started correspondence courses to teach people exactly how to lie to
the Tribunals. Trouble about freedom of the pamphleteer followed. I had
to admit--it has been rather a sloppy business. The people who made the
law knew their own minds, but we English are not an expressive people."

These are not easy things to say in Elementary (and slightly Decayed)
French or in Elementary and Corrupt Italian.

"But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and issue
leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work clamouring to be
done?"

"That," I said, "is the Whig tradition."

When they pressed me further, I said: "I am really the questioner. I
am visiting _your_ country, and you have to tell _me_ things. It is
not right that I should do all the telling. Tell me all about Romain
Rolland."

And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and the
Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of the net
of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In several
conversations we began to work out in general terms the psychology of
those people who were against the war. But usually we could not get to
t