the war he would have been a raving militarist, but since she was in it he had got to find reasons why she was wrong.  And jolly good reasons they were, too.  I couldn’t have met his arguments if I had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet.  The world was all crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands.  But the fellow had merits.  He had a couple of jolly children whom he adored, and he would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry about the beauty and greatness of England.  He was forty-five; if he had been thirty and in my battalion I could have made a soldier out of him.

There were dozens more whose names I have forgotten, but they had one common characteristic.  They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I used to amuse myself with finding their originals in the Pilgrim’s Progress.  When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter, they fell woefully short.  They shut out the war from their lives, some out of funk, some out of pure levity of mind, and some because they were really convinced that the thing was all wrong.  I think I grew rather popular in my role of the seeker after truth, the honest colonial who was against the war by instinct and was looking for instruction in the matter.  They regarded me as a convert from an alien world of action which they secretly dreaded, though they affected to despise it.  Anyhow they talked to me very freely, and before long I had all the pacifist arguments by heart.  I made out that there were three schools.  One objected to war altogether, and this had few adherents except Aronson and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in Dartmoor.  The second thought that the Allies’ cause was tainted, and that Britain had contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe.  This included all the adherents of the L.D.A.—­or League of Democrats against Aggression—­a very proud body.  The third and much the largest, which embraced everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and that the business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany had learned her lesson.  I was myself a modest member of the last school, but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and I hoped with luck to qualify for the first.  My acquaintances approved my progress.  Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature, and that I would end by waving the red flag.

Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in it all.  This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I had embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a fiasco.  Sometimes they worried me beyond endurance.  When the news of Messines came nobody took the slightest interest, while I was aching to tooth every detail of the great fight.  And when they talked on military affairs, as Letchford and others did sometimes, it was difficult to keep from sending them all to the devil, for their amateur cocksureness