But there was an imp of frustration about. He pervaded, like Ariel, all the labouring ship of our State. I had seen him in Lancashire once, on one of the early days of the war, when fifty young miners marched in from one pit, with their colliery band, to enlist at an advertised place and time of enlistment. The futilitarian elf took care that the shutters were up and nobody there, so that the men should kick their heels all the day in the street and walk back at night with their tails between their legs, and the band not playing, to tell their mates that the whole thing was a mug's game, a ramp, got up by the hot-air merchants and crooks in control. The imp must have grinned, not quite as all of us have grinned since, on the wrong side of our mouths, at the want of faith that miners have in the great and wise who rule over them. Another practical joke of his was to slip into the War Office or Admiralty and tear up any letters he found from people offering gifts of motor-cars, motor-boats, steam-yachts, training grounds, etc., lest they be answered and the writers and other friends of their country encouraged. Perhaps his brightest triumph of all was to dress himself up as England and send away with a flea in her ear the Ireland whom the wonder-working Redmond had induced to offer to fight at our side. Those were a few of his master-pieces. Between times he would keep his hand in by putting it into the Old Army's head to take the keenness out of the New. Dearest of all the New Army's infant illusions was the Old Army--still at that time the demigod host of an unshattered legend of Mons. To the new recruits any old Regular sergeant was more--if the world can hold more--than a county cricketer is to a small boy at school. He had the talisman; he was a vessel full of the grace by which everything was to be saved; like a king, he could "touch for" the malady of unsoldierliness. How could he err, how could he shirk, now that the fate of a world hung upon him?