"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that. He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or glory, at least not in the same conscious way. He'd fight just as well against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean. He's just--well, look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental --they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But Tommy Atkins --well, he's just playing football!" The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and Rogue. Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea, boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing: "Smash the blighter's head!" There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles of racial history and difference. At a Regent Street moving-picture show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her companion. There were pictures of the silk industry in Japan--moths emerging from cocoons, the breeding process, the hatching of the eggs, the life history of these anonymous little specks magnified until for the moment they almost had a sort of personality. And one murmured: "Comme c'est drole, la nature!" Sunday. It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night--frosty dusk, with the distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist hilly streets busy with soldiers and bright with lights. It made one think of a college town at home on the eve of the great game, so keen and happy seemed all these fit young men--officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers spinning yarns in smoky cafes--for the great game of war.