a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened
ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here and there among
officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a
seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land's End to
John o' Groat's and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but
answered the ruffle of Drake's drum and, with simplicity and gravity
in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas,
hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and
shirked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious
hell. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who
fought the Spanish Armada and singed the King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz
harbor. The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's
(the scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and
not less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British
seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium,
and all of us.

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt,
Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine
flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal
except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous
in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful.
That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and
brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of
our troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness,
suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day
the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor
of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of
mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great
war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire, dwelt amid
high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of
poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept
above mine-craters which upheaved the hell-fire of Pluto, and defied
thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure
these things without revolt--ideals higher than the selfish motives of
life. They did not fight for greed