His khaki is spotless, thanks to his wife, who has dressed in her best for the occasion.  Terrible as war itself, but new, that hat of hers, which probably represented a good deal of looking into windows and pricing; and her gown of the cheapest material, drooping from her round shoulders, is the product of the poor dress-making skill of hands which show only too well who does all the housework at home.  The children, a boy of four and a girl of seven, are in their best, too, with faces scrubbed till they shine.

You will see like scenes in stations at home when the father has found work in a distant city and is going on ahead to get established before the family follow him.  Such incidents are common in civil life; they became common at Victoria Station.  What is common has no significance, editors say.

When the time came to go through the gate, the veteran picked the boy up in his arms and pressed him very close and the little girl looked on wonderingly, while the mother was not going to make it any harder for the father by tears.  “Good-bye, Tom!” she said.  So his name was Tom, this tenth man.

I spoke with him.  His battalion was full with recruits.  It had been kept full.  But, considering the law of chance, what about the surviving one out of an original ten?

“Yes, I’ve had my luck with me,” he said.  “Probably my turn will come.  Maybe I’ll never see the wife and kids again.”

The morning roar of London had begun.  That station was a small spot in the city.  There were not enough officers and men taking the train to make up a day’s casualty list; for ours was only a small party returning from leave.  The transports, unseen, carried the multitudes.  Wherever one had gone in England he had seen soldiers and wherever he went in France he was to see still more soldiers.  England had become an armed camp; and England plodded on, “muddled” on, preparing, ever preparing, to forge in time of war the thunderbolt for war which was undreamed of in time of peace when other nations were forging their thunderbolts.

Still the recruiting posters called for more soldiers and the casualty lists appeared day after day with the regularity of want advertisements.  Imagine eight million men under arms in the United States and you have the equivalent to what England did by the volunteer system.  The more there were the more pessimistic became the British Press.  Pessimism brought in recruits.  Bad news made England take another deep breath of energizing determination.  It was the last battle which was decisive.  She had always won that.  She would win it again.