To-day, after many months of war, the British Army in the field is as smart, in a military sense, as tidy—­if it will forgive me the word—­as well ordered, as efficiently cared for, as the German Army was in the beginning.  Partly this is due to its splendid equipment.  Mostly it is due to that fetish of the British soldier wherever he may be—­personal neatness.

Behind the lines he is jaunty, cheerful, smart beyond belief.  He hates the trenches—­not because they are dangerous or monotonous but because it is difficult to take a bath in them.  He is four days in the trenches and four days out.  On his days out he drills and marches, to get back into condition after the forced inaction of the trenches.  And he gets his hair trimmed.

There is something about the appearance of the British soldier in the field that got me by the throat.  Perhaps because they are, in a sense, my own people, speaking my tongue, looking at things from a view-point that I could understand.  That partly.  But it was more than that.

These men and boys are volunteers, the very flower of England.  They march along the roads, heads well up, eyes ahead, thousands of them.  What a tragedy for the country that gives them up!  Who will take their places?—­these splendid Scots with their picturesque kilts, their bare, muscular knees, their great shoulders; the cheery Irish, swaggering a bit and with a twinkle in their blue eyes; these tall young English boys, showing race in every line; these dashing Canadians, so impressive that their every appearance on a London street was certain to set the crowds to cheering.

I saw them in London, and later on I saw them at the front.  Still later I saw them again, prostrate on the ground, in hospital trains, on hospital ships.  I saw mounds, too, marked with wooden crosses.

Volunteers and patriots!  A race incapable of a mean thing, incapable of a cruelty.  A race of sportsmen, playing this horrible game of war fairly, almost too honestly.  A race, not of diplomats, but of gentlemen.

“You will always be fools,” said a captured German naval officer to his English captors, “and we shall never be gentlemen!”

But they are not fools.  It is that attitude toward the English that may defeat Germany in the end.

Every man in the British Army to-day has counted the cost.  He is there because he elected to be there.  He is going to stay by until the thing is done, or he is.  He says very little about it.  He is uncomfortable if any one else says anything about it.  He is rather matter of fact, indeed, and nonchalant as long as things are being done fairly.  But there is nothing calm about his attitude when his opponent hits below the belt.  It was a sense of fair play, as well as humanity, that made England rise to the call of Belgium.  It is England’s sense of fair play that makes her soldiers and sailors go white with fury at the drowning of women and children