philosophy.  And yet I could understand why certain Frenchmen, in spite of their admiration, were sometimes irritated by these British officers.  There were times when the similarity between them, the uniformity of that ridiculous little moustache on the upper lip, the intonation of voices with the peculiar timbre of the public school drawl, sound to them rather tiresome.  They had the manners of a caste, the touch of arrogance which belongs to a caste, in power.  Every idea they had was a caste idea, contemptuous in a civil way of poor devils who had other ideas and who were therefore guilty—­not by their own fault of course—­of shocking bad form.  To be a Socialist in such company would be worse than being drunk.  To express a belief in democratic liberty would cause a silence to fall upon a group of them as though some obscenity beyond the limits allowed in an officers’ mess-room had been uttered by a man without manners.

Their attitude to French officers was, in the beginning of the war, calculated to put a little strain upon the Entente Cordiale.  It was an attitude of polite but haughty condescension.  A number of young Frenchmen of the best families had been appointed as interpreters to the British Expedition.  There were aristocrats among them whose names run like golden threads through the pages of French history.  It was therefore disconcerting when the young Viscomte de Chose and a certain Marquis de Machin found that their knowledge of English was used for the purpose of buying a packet of cigarettes for a lieutenant who knew no French, and of running errands for British officers who accepted such services as a matter of course.  The rank-and-file of the British army which first came into France was also a little careless of French susceptibilities.  After the first rapture of that welcome which was extended to anyone in khaki, French citizens began to look a little askance at the regiments from the Highlands and Lowlands, some of whose men demanded free gifts in the shops, and, when a little drunk, were rather crude in their amorous advances to girls of decent up-bringing.  These things were inevitable.  In our regular army there were the sweepings of many slums, as well as the best blood of our peasantry and our good old families.  Tough and hardened fellows called to the Colours again from Glasgow and Liverpool, Cardiff and Limehouse, had none of the refinements of the younger generation of soldiers who prefer lemonade to whisky, and sweetmeats to shag.  It was these who in the first Expeditionary Force gave most trouble to the military police and found themselves under the iron heel of a discipline which is very hard and very necessary in time of war.

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