These men were heroic soldiers, yet our hero-worship need not blind us to the truth of things.  There is nothing more utterly false than to imagine that war purges human nature of all its frailties and vices, and that under the shadow of death a great body of men gathered like this from many classes and cities, become suddenly white knights, sans-peur et sans reproche, inspired by the highest ideals of faith and chivalry.  If only some new Shakespeare would come out of the ranks after this war to give us immortal portraits of a twentieth-century Falstaff, with a modern Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph—­what a human comedy would be there in the midst of all this tragedy in France and Flanders, setting off the fine exalted heroism of all those noble and excellent men who, like the knights and men-at-arms of Henry at Agincourt, thought that “the fewer men the greater share of honour,” and fought for England with a devotion that was careless of death.

After the British retreat from Mons, when our regular troops realized very rapidly the real meaning of modern warfare, knowing now that it was to be no “picnic,” but a deadly struggle against great odds, and a fight of men powerless against infernal engines, there came out to France by every ship the oddest types of men who had been called out to fill up the gaps and take a share in the deadly business.  These “dug-outs” were strange fellows, some of them.  Territorial officers who had held commissions in the Yeomanry, old soldiers who had served in India, Egypt, and South Africa, before playing interminable games of chess in St. James’s Street, or taking tea in country rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned voices which could recite a passage from Ovid with cultured diction; purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once “gone through the Guards,” before spending their week-ends at Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by their martial manners.

The Red Cross was responsible for many astounding representatives of the British race in France, and there were other crosses—­purple, green, blue, and black—­who contributed to this melodrama of mixed classes and types.  Benevolent old gentlemen, garbed like second-hand Field Marshals, tottered down the quaysides and took the salutes of startled French soldiers with bland but dignified benevolence.  The Jewish people were not only generous to the Red Cross work with unstinted wealth which they poured into its coffers, but with rich young men who offered their lives and their motor-cars in this good service—­though the greater part of them never went nearer to the front (through no fault of their own) than Rouen or Paris, where they spent enormous sums of money at the best hotels, and took lady friends for joy rides in ambulances of magnificent design.  Boulogne became overcrowded with men and women wearing military uniforms of no known design with badges of mysterious import.