One’s imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and ideals and habits of mind.  There has been too much of the impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving with one purpose.  In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane—­so that when I met him in a field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump.  And there was the Irish peasant who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of Connemara.  Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage fighting instinct.  Soldiers who had been through several battles and knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of younger men whose first experience of shell-fire was soul-shattering, so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.

In the ranks were men who had been mob-orators, and who had once been those worst of pests, “barrack-room lawyers.”  They talked Socialism and revolution in the trenches to comrades who saw no use to alter the good old ways of England and “could find no manner of use” for political balderdash.  Can you not see all these men, made up of every type in the life of the British Isles, suddenly transported to the Continent and thence into the zone of fire of massed artillery which put each man to the supreme test of courage, demanding the last strength of his soul?  Some of them had been slackers, rebels against discipline, “hard cases.”  Some of them were sensitive fellows with imaginations over-developed by cinematograph shows and the unhealthiness of life in cities.  Some of them were no braver than you or I, my readers.  And yet out of all this mass of manhood, with all their faults, vices, coward instincts, pride of courage, unexpressed ideals, unconscious patriotism, old traditions of pluck, untutored faith in things more precious than self-interest—­the mixture that one finds in any great body of men—­there was made an army, that “contemptible little army” of ours which has added a deathless story of human valour to the chronicles of our race.