M. Joseph Reinach, in whose company I visited the French part of the Somme front, was full of a scheme, which he has since published, for the breaking up and recomposition of the French and British armies into a series of composite armies which would blend the magnificent British manhood and material with French science and military experience.  He pointed out the endless advantages of such an arrangement; the stimulus of emulation, the promotion of intimate fraternal feeling between the peoples of the two countries.  “At present,” he said, “no Frenchman ever sees an Englishman except at Amiens or on the Somme.  Many of them still have no idea of what the English are doing....”

“Have I ever told you the story of compulsory Greek at Oxford and Cambridge?” I asked abruptly.

“What has that to do with it?”

“Or how two undistinguished civil service commissioners can hold up the scientific education of our entire administrative class?”

M. Reinach protested further.

“Because you are proposing to loosen the grip of a certain narrow and limited class upon British affairs, and you propose it as though it were a job as easy as rearranging railway fares or sending a van to Calais.  That is the problem that every decent Englishman is trying to solve to-day, every man of that Greater Britain which has supplied these five million volunteers, these magnificent temporary officers and all this wealth of munitions.  And the oligarchy is so invincibly fortified!  Do you think it will let in Frenchmen to share its controls?  It will not even let in Englishmen.  It holds the class schools; the class universities; the examinations for our public services are its class shibboleths; it is the church, the squirearchy, the permanent army class, permanent officialdom; it makes every appointment, it is the fountain of honour; what it does not know is not knowledge, what it cannot do must not be done.  It rules India ignorantly and obstructively; it will wreck the empire rather than relinquish its ascendancy in Ireland.  It is densely self-satisfied and instinctively monopolistic.  It is on our backs, and with it on our backs we common English must bleed and blunder to victory....  And you make this proposal!”

3

The antagonistic relations of the Anglican oligarchy with the greater and greater-spirited Britain that thrust behind it in this war are probably paralleled very closely in Germany, probably they are exaggerated in Germany with a bigger military oligarchy and a relatively lesser civil body under it.  This antagonism is the oddest outcome of the tremendous de-militarisation of war that has been going on.  In France it is probably not so marked because of the greater flexibility and adaptability of the French culture.