I sometimes think the country-folk round about where I live the most sensible people I know.  They say with regard to the War—­or said at its outset:  “What are they fighting about? I can’t make out, and nobody seems to know.  What I’ve seen o’ the Germans they’re a decent enough folk—­much like ourselves.  If there’s got to be fightin’, why don’t them as makes the quarrel go and fight wi’ each other?  But killing all them folk that’s got no quarrel, and burnin’ their houses and farms, and tramplin’ down all that good corn—­and all them brave men dead what can never live again—­its scandalous, I say.”

This at the outset.  But afterwards, when the papers had duly explained that the Germans were mere barbarians and savages, bent on reducing the whole world to military slavery, they began to take sides and feel there was good cause for fighting.  Meanwhile almost exactly the same thing was happening in Germany, where England was being represented as a greedy and deceitful Power, trying to boss and crush all the other nations.  Thus each nation did what was perhaps, from its own point of view, the most sensible thing to do—­persuaded itself that it was fighting in a just and heroic cause, that it was a St. George against the Dragon, a David out to slay Goliath.

The attitude of the peasant, however, or agriculturist, all over the world, is the same.  He does not deal in romantic talk about St. George and the Dragon.  He sees too clearly the downright facts of life.  He has no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight.  Being the one honest man in the community—­the one man who creates, not only his own food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts—­and if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it.  It is only occasionally—­when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle, and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.

England, curiously enough, is almost the only country in the world where the peasant or ordinary field-worker has no field of his own[22]; and I find that in the villages and among the general agricultural population there is even now but little enthusiasm for the present war—­though the raid on our coasts at Scarborough and other places certainly did something to stimulate it.  Partly this is, as I have said, because the agricultural worker knows that his work is foundational, and that nothing else is of importance compared with it. [At this moment, for instance, there are peasants in Belgium and Northern France ploughing and sowing, and so forth, actually close to the trenches and between the fighting lines.] Partly it is because in England, alas! the countryman has so little right or direct interest in the soil.  One wonders sometimes why he should feel any enthusiasm.  Why should men want to fight for their land when they have no land to fight for—­when the most they can do is to die at the foot of a trespass-board, singing, “Britons never, never shall be slaves!”