All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men's ingrained moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour. But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the phlegmatic diagnosis: "He'll 'ave 'ad a drop o' sugar-water an' got excited." Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would have been of the abhorred nature of a "scene." Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all "hot air" and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: "What order, or disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness, rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?" Instead of contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred per cent. Satanist he became about a thirty per center. The disbelief, the suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums--all that blank, unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.