But strangest of all, and (as I now especially believe) most pregnant with meaning for the future, was to find the inherited experience in me of so much teaching and careful habit—­instinct of command, if you will—­all that goes to make what we call in Western Europe a “gentleman,” put at the orders and the occasional insult of a hierarchy of office, many of whose functionaries were peasants and artisans.  Stripes on the arm, symbols, suddenly became of overwhelming value; what I had been made with so much care in an English public school was here thought nothing but a hindrance and an absurdity.  This had seemed to me first a miracle, then a grievous injustice, then most unpractical, and at last, like one that sees the answer to a riddle, I saw (when I had long lost my manners and ceased to care for refinements) that the French were attempting, a generation before any others in the world, to establish an army that should be a mere army, and in which a living man counted only as one numbered man.

Whether that experiment will hold or not I cannot tell; it shocks the refinement of the whole West of Europe; it seems monstrous to the aristocratic organisation of Germany; it jars in France also with the traditions of that decent elder class of whom so many still remain to guide the Republic, and in whose social philosophy the segregation of a “directing class” has been hitherto a dogma.  But soon I cared little whether that experiment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or whether the French were to perfect a democracy where wealth has one vast experience of its own artificiality, or to fail.  The intellectual interest of such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove out every other feeling.

I became like a man who has thoroughly awaked from a long sleep and finds that in sleep he has been taken overseas.  I merged into the great system whose wheels and grindings had at first astonished or disgusted me, and I found that they had made of me what they meant to make.  I cared more for guns than for books; I now obeyed by instinct not men, but symbols of authority.  No comfortable fallacy remained; it no longer seemed strange that my captain was a man promoted from the ranks; that one of my lieutenants was an Alsatian charity boy and the other a rich fellow mixed up with sugar-broking; that the sergeant of my piece should be a poor young noble, the wheeler of No. 5 a wealthy and very vulgar chemist’s son, the man in the next bed ("my ancient,” as they say in that service) a cook of some skill, and my bombardier a mild young farmer.  I thought only in terms of the artillery:  I could judge men from their aptitude alone, and in me, I suppose, were accomplished many things—­one of Danton’s dreams, one of St. Just’s prophecies, the fulfilment also of what a hundred brains had silently determined twenty years before when the staff gave up their swords outside Metz; the army and the kind of army of which Chanzy had said in the first breath of the armistice, “A man who forgets it should be hanged, but a man who speaks of it before its time should be shot with the honours of his rank.”