It was a question much asked at the time by those whose post-war inclinations to answer "Nothing, among the lot who run England now" are whitening the hair of statesmen. They were then only asking "How far does it go? How much of the timber is rotten"? Enough to bring down the whole house? Here, there, everywhere the men's new suspicion peered about in the dark and the half-light. Most of the men were the almost boundless reservoirs of patience, humility, and good humour that common Englishmen are. They would take long to run dry. But the waters were steadily falling. Most of them had come from civil employments in which the curse of Adam still holds and a man must either work or get out, mind his P's and Q's, or go short of his victuals. They knew that in civil life a foreman who thieved like some of the Regular N.C.O.'s would soon be in the street or in gaol. They knew that in civil life a manager who could not get down to the point any better than the colonel or the major would soon have the business piled up on the rocks. Here was an eye-opening find--a world in which any old rule of that kind could be dodged if you got the right tip. It became the dominant topic for talk, more dominant even than food, the staple theme of the conversation of soldiers. How far did the rottenness go? Would they ever get to the other side of this bog through which poor old England was wading? If you bored deeper and deeper still into this amazing old Regular Army would there ever come a point at which you would strike the good firm stone of English decency and sense again? And was it open to hope that in Germany, too, such failures abounded--that these diseases of ours were rife in all armies and not in the British alone, so that there might be a chance for us still, as there is for one toothless dog fighting another? Whatever else might lack in our training-camps throughout England during the spring and summer of 1915, good fresh food for suspicion always abounded. Runlets of news and rumour came trickling from France; wounded soldiers talked and could not be censored; they talked of the failure of French; of the sneer on the face of France; of Staff work that hung up whole platoons of our men, like old washing or scarecrows, to rot on uncut German wire; of little, splendid bands of company officers and men who did take bits of enemy trench, in spite of it all, and then were bombed to death by the Germans at leisure, no support coming, no bombs to throw back--and here, at home, old Regular colonels were saying to hollow squares of their men: "I hear that in France there's a certain amount of throwing of some sort of ginger-beer bottles about, but the old Lee-Metford's good enough for me."