And studying them, at cafe tables, at the base, or in their depots, I acknowledged that, broadly, they were right.  In spite of an extraordinary ignorance of art and letters (speaking of the great majority), in spite of ideas stereotyped by the machinery of their schools and universities, so that one might know precisely their attitude to such questions as social reform, internationalism, Home Rule for Ireland, or the Suffragettes—­any big problem demanding freedom of thought and un-conventionality of discussion—­it was impossible to resist the conviction that these officers of the British army have qualities, supreme of their kind, which give a mastery to men.  Their courage was not a passion, demanding rage or religious fervour, or patriotic enthusiasm, for its inspiration.  It was the very law of their life, the essential spirit in them.  They were unconscious of it as a man is unconscious of breathing, unless diseased.  Their honour was not a thing to talk about.  To prate about the honour of the army or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their mother.  It is not done.  And yet, as Mark Antony said, “They were all honourable men,” and there seemed an austerity of virtue in them which no temptation would betray—­the virtue of men who have a code admitting of certain easy vices, but not of treachery, or cowardice, or corruption.

They had such good form, these young men who had come out to a dirty devilish war.  It was enormously good to hear them talking to each other in just the same civil, disinterested, casual way which belongs to the conversational range of St. James’s Street clubs.  Not once—­like French soldiers—­did they plunge into heated discussions on the ethics of war, or the philosophy of life, or the progress of civilization, or the rights of democracies.  Never did they reveal to casual strangers like myself—­and hundreds of French soldiers did—­ the secret affections of their hearts, flowing back to the women they had left, or their fears of death and disablement, or their sense of the mystery of God.  Not even war, with its unloosing of old restraints, its smashing of conventionalities, could break down the code of these young English gentlemen whose first and last lessons had been those of self-concealment and self-control.

In England these characteristics are accepted, and one hardly thinks of them.  It is the foreigner’s point of view of us.  But in France, in war time, in a country all vibrant with emotionalism, this restraint of manner and speech and utter disregard of all “problems” and mysteries of life, and quiet, cheerful acceptation of the job in hand, startled the imagination of Englishmen who had been long enough away from home to stand aloof and to study those officers with a fresh vision.  There was something superb in those simple, self-confident, normal men, who made no fuss, but obeyed orders, or gave them, with a spirit of discipline which belonged to their own souls and was not imposed by a self-conscious