But a War Office capable of placarding Lord Roberts’s declaration that the men who are enlisting are doing “what all able-bodied men in the kingdom should do” is clearly ignorant enough for anything.  I do not blame Lord Roberts for his oratorical flourish:  we have all said things just as absurd on the platform in moments of enthusiasm.  But the officials who reproduced it in cold blood would have us believe that soldiers live on air; that ammunition drops from heaven like manna; and that an army could hold the field for twenty-four hours without the support of a still more numerous body of civilians working hard to support it.  Sane men gasp at such placards and ask angrily, “What sort of fools do you take us for?” I have in my hand a copy of The Torquay Times containing a hospitable invitation to soldiers’ wives to call at the War Office, Whitehall, S.W., if they desire “assistance and explanation of their case.”  The return fare from Torquay to London is thirty shillings and sixpence third class; but the War Office no doubt assumes that all soldiers’ wives keep motor cars.  Still, let us be just even to the War Office.  It did not ask the soldiers’ wives for forms of authorization to pay the separation allowance to their bankers every six months.  It actually offered the money monthly!

Delusive Promises.

The middle and upper classes are nearly as bad as the War Office.  They talk of keeping every man’s place open for him until the end of the war.  Obviously this is flatly impossible.  Some places can be kept, and no doubt are being kept.  Some functions are suspended by the war and cannot be resumed until the troops return to civil life and resume them.  Employers are so hardened to the daily commercial necessity for discharging men without a thought as to what is to become of them that they are quite ready to undertake to sack the replacers when the troops come back.  Also the return of peace may be followed by a revival of trade in which employment may not be hard to find, even by discharged soldiers, who are always passed over in the labour market in favour of civilians, as those well know who have the task of trying to find places for them.  But these considerations do not justify an attempt to persuade recruits that they can go off soldiering for months—­they are told by Lord Kitchener that it will probably be for years—­and then come back and walk to their benches or into their offices and pick up their work as if they had left only the night before.  The very people who are promising this are raising the cry “business as usual” in the same breath.  How can business be carried on as usual, or carried on at all, on unoccupied office stools and at counters with no men behind them?  Such rubbish is an insult to the recruit’s intelligence.  These promises of keeping places open were made to the men who enlisted for South Africa, and were of course broken, as a promise to supply green cheese by quarrying the moon