aturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing "We won't
come back till it's over, over there!" The difference is that these
Britishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face, have
tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heartsickness and seasickness
are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of the British army.
I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale of our own army
also, but at present the British are holding the fort. Tommy would never
give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste of it, and his songs
reflect his experience. Other songs reached my ears each night, above
the hissing and pounding of the Channel seas, but the unseen group
returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt and Crecy, of
Waterloo, of the countless journeys across this same stormy strip of
water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, and one wondered
whether war were eternal and inevitable, after all.

And what does Tommy think about it--this war? My own limited experience
thoroughly indorses Mr. Galsworthy's splendid analysis of British-soldier
psychology that appeared in the December North American. The average
man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence of England.
The British Government itself, in its reconstruction department for the
political education of the wounded, has given partial denial to the old
maxim that it is the soldier's business not to think but to obey; and the
British army is leavened with men who read and reflect in the long nights
of watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about conditions in the
past and resolutions concerning those of the future. The very army
itself has had a miracle happen to it: it has been democratized--and with
the cheerful consent of the class to which formerly the possession of
commissions was largely confined. Gradually, to these soldier-thinkers,
as well as to the mass of others at home, is unfolding the vision of a
new social order which is indeed worth fighting for and dying for.

III

At last, our knees cramped and our feet soaked, we saw the lights of the
French port dancing across the veil of rain, like thistledowns of fire,
and presently we were at rest at a stone quay. As I stood waiting on the
deck to have my passport vised, I tried to reconstruct the features of
this little seaport as I had seen it, many years before, on a bright
summer's day when I had motored from Paris on my