Wounded?  No—­he pointed to his eyes, which were bloodshot, patted his forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, rubbed his legs, and scowled.  “Rheumatism!” said the Frenchman.  The Algerian pressed his palms together six times, then held up two fingers.  “He’s sixty-two years old!” said the Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws and pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it.  They talked for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again, “Volunteer!” and then, “Scout!”

The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then of brushing something over, and tapped himself on the chest.

“Deux!” he said.  “Two Germans—­me!” Evidently he was going back to the desert satisfied.

Train after train passed us, northward bound, some from Boulogne, some from the trenches north of Paris evidently, bringing artillery caked with mud—­all packed with British soldiers leaning from doors of their cattle-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.  At the end of each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers—­tall, slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats, with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior sort of sport.

The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient, light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as Dickens and Dumas—­and in the same ways!

An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before of the “extraordinary detachment” of Tommy Atkins.

“Take almost any of those little French soldiers—­they’ve got a pretty good idea what the war is about—­at any rate, they’ve got a sentiment about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they’ll go to their death shouting for la patrie.  Now, Tommy Atkins isn’t the least like that.  He doesn’t fight—­and you know how he does fight—­for patriotism or glory, at least not in the same conscious way.  He’d fight just as well against another of his own regiments—­if you know what I mean.  He’s just—­well, look at the soldiers’ letters.  The Germans are sentimental —­they are all martyrs.  The Frenchmen are all heroes.  But Tommy Atkins —­well, he’s just playing football!”

The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Rogue.

Imagine, for a moment, that scene—­the three great ships going over like stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea, boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing: 

“Smash the blighter’s head!”