, now languishing in Dartmoor. The
second thought that the Allies' cause was tainted, and that Britain had
contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe. This included all
the adherents of the L.D.A.--or League of Democrats against
Aggression--a very proud body. The third and much the largest, which
embraced everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and that
the business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany had
learned her lesson. I was myself a modest member of the last school,
but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and I hoped with
luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances approved my progress.
Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature, and that I
would end by waving the red flag.

Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most
of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in it
all. This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I had
embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a fiasco. Sometimes they
worried me beyond endurance. When the news of Messines came nobody took
the slightest interest, while I was aching to tooth every detail of the
great fight. And when they talked on military affairs, as Letchford and
others did sometimes, it was difficult to keep from sending them all to
the devil, for their amateur cocksureness would have riled Job. One had
got to batten down the recollection of our fellows out there who were
sweating blood to keep these fools snug. Yet I found it impossible to
be angry with them for long, they were so babyishly innocent. Indeed, I
couldn't help liking them, and finding a sort of quality in them. I had
spent three years among soldiers, and the British regular, great follow
that he is, has his faults. His discipline makes him in a funk of
red-tape and any kind of superior authority. Now these people were
quite honest and in a perverted way courageous. Letchford was, at any
rate. I could no more have done what he did and got hunted off
platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the streets than I
could have written his leading articles.

All the same I was rather low about my job. Barring the episode of the
ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a
clue or a hint of any mystery. The place and the people were as open
and bright as a Y.M.C.A. hut. But one day I got a solid wad of comfort.
In a corner of Letchford's paper, the _Critic_,