There is a very popular English word just making its place in America.  The word is “swank.”  It is both noun and verb.  One swanks when one swaggers.  One puts on swank when one puts on side.  And because I hold a brief for the English, and because I was fortunate enough to meet all sorts of English people, I want to say that there is very little swank among them.  The example of simplicity and genuineness has been set by the King and Queen.  I met many different circles of people.  From the highest to the lowest, there was a total absence of that arrogance which the American mind has so long associated with the English.  For fear of being thought to swagger, an Englishman will understate his case.  And so with the various English officers I met at the front.  There was no swank.  They were downright, unassuming, extremely efficient-looking men, quick to speak of German courage, ready to give the benefit of the doubt where unproved outrages were in question, but rousing, as I have said, to pale fury where their troops were being unfairly attacked.

While the car was being brought to the door General Huguet pointed out to me on the map where I was going.  As we stood there his pencil drew a light semicircle round the town of Ypres.

“A great battle,” he said, and described it.  Colonel Fitzgerald took up the narrative.  So it happened that, in the three different staff headquarters, Belgian, French and English, executive officers of the three armies in the western field described to me that great battle—­the frightful slaughter of the English, their re-enforcement at a critical time by General Foch’s French Army of the North, and the final holding of the line.

The official figures of casualties were given me again:  English forty-five thousand out of a hundred and twenty thousand engaged; the French seventy thousand, and the German over two hundred thousand.

Turning to the table, Colonel Fitzgerald picked up a sheet of paper covered with figures.

“It is interesting,” he said, “to compare the disease and battle mortality percentages of this war with the percentages in other wars; to see, considering the frightful weather and the trenches, how little disease there has been among our troops.  Compare the figures with the Boer War, for instance.  And even then our percentage has been somewhat brought up by the Indian troops.”

“Have many of them been ill?”

“They have felt the weather,” he replied; “not the cold so much as the steady rain.  And those regiments of English that have been serving in India have felt the change.  They particularly have suffered from frostbitten feet.”

I knew that.  More than once I had seen men being taken back from the British lines, their faces twisted with pain, their feet great masses of cotton and bandages which they guarded tenderly, lest a chance blow add to their agony.  Even the English system of allowing the men to rub themselves with lard and oil from the waist down before going into flooded trenches has not prevented the tortures of frostbite.