These were, to it, the untested, unsifted, "the crowd that was never put through it." There were presumptions against them, besides. They were akin, in the combatant's sight, to the elfish gods that had ruled and bedevilled his training at home. They were of the breed of the wasters, the misorganizers, the beauties who sent his battalion out from the Wiltshire downs to Bruay along a course of gigantic zigzags, like a yacht beating up in the teeth of a wind, first running far south to Havre, then north to near the German Ocean, and then going about and opening out again upon the southward tack until Bruay was struck; for it was, indeed, along a trajectory somewhat like that of an actual flash of lightning in some quaint engraving that Britain hurled at the enemy many of her new thunderbolts of war. Also, they stood in the shoes of the men who in French's day had sent platoon commanders to take woods and quarries not marked on their maps. And they were the men who, when troops had been marching twelve miles in full kit on the high-cambered, heavily greased Flanders setts in the rain, would appear on the roadside turf round a blind corner, sitting chubby and sleek on fresh horses, and say that the marching was damned bad and troops must go back to-morrow and do it again. But the chief count was the first--that they had not all gone through the mill; that they lived in a world in which all the respectable old bubbles, pricked elsewhere, were still fat and shining, where all the old bluffs were uncalled and still going strong, and the wangler could still inherit the earth and eye-wash reign happy and glorious. Not a judgment wholly just. But not one contemptible either; for, wherever it ended, it set out from the right idea of judging a man only by what he was worth and what he could do. And, just or not, it was real; it influenced men's acts, not to the extent of losing us the war, but to that of helping to send the winners home possessed with that contemptuous impatience of authority which has already thrown out of gear so much of the pre-war machinery for regulating the joint action of mankind. IV