The argument reached a sudden climax.  There were wounded officers present.  One of them said, “You wouldn’t speak that way if you had the foggiest conception of the kind of chaps we have in the trenches.”

“It makes no difference what kind they are,” the pessimist replied intolerantly.  “I’m asking you to face facts.  Because you’ve succeeded in an attack, you soldiers seem to think that the war is ended.  You base your arguments all the time on your little local knowledge of your own particular front.”

The discussion ceased abruptly.  Every one sprang up.  Voices strove together in advising this “facer of facts” to get into khaki and to go to where he could obtain precisely the same kind of little local knowledge—­perhaps, a few wounds as well.  His presence was dishonourable—­contaminating.  We filed out and left him sitting humped in a chair, looking puzzled and pathetic, murmuring, “But I thought I was among friends.”

My last clear-cut recollection is of a chubby young American Naval Airman standing over him, with clenched fists, passionately instructing him in the spiritual geography of America.  That’s one type of fool; the type who specialises in catastrophe; the type who in eternally facing up to facts, takes no account of that magic quality, courage, which can make one man more terrible than an army; the type who is so profoundly well-informed, about externals, that he ignores the mightiness of soul that can remould externals to spiritual purposes.  Were I a German, the spectacle of that solitary consumptive leaving the climate which meant life to him and hastening home to give just six months of service to his country, would be more menacing than the loss of an entire corps frontage.

And there’s the type who can’t forget; he suffers from a fundamental lack of generosity.  The Englishman of this type can’t refrain from quoting such phrases as, “Too proud to fight,” whenever opportunity offers.  His American counterpart insists that he is not fighting for Great Britain, but for the French.  He makes himself offensive by silly talk about sister republics, implying that all other forms of Government are essentially tyrannic.  He never loses an opportunity to mention Lafayette, assuming that one French man is worth ten Britishers.  A very gross falsehood is frequently on the lips of this sort of man; he doesn’t know where he picked it up and has never troubled to test its accuracy.  I can tell him where it originated; at Berlin in the bureau for Hun propaganda.  Every time he utters it he is helping the enemy.  This falsehood is to the effect that Great Britain has conserved her man-power; that in the early days she let Frenchmen do the fighting and that now she is marking time till Americans are ready to die in her stead.  This statement is so stupendously untrue that it goes unheeded by those who know the empty homes of England or have witnessed the gallantry of our piled-up dead.