Most of our N.C.O.'s and men in the field had come to feel that it was left to them and to the soundest regimental officers to pull the foundered rulers of England and heads of the army through the scrape. They assumed now that while they were doing this job they must expect to be crawled upon by all the vermin bred in the dark places of a rich country vulgarly governed. They were well on their guard by this time against expressing any thoroughgoing faith in anything or anybody, or incurring any suspicion of dreaming that such a faith was likely to animate others; a man was a fool if he imagined that anyone set over him was not looking after number one; the patriotism of the press was bunkum, screening all sorts of queer games; the eloquence of patriotic orators was just a smoke barrage to cover their little manoeuvres against one another; the red tabs of the Staff were the "Red Badge of Funk"; a hospital ward full of sick men would exchange, when left to themselves, vitriolic surmises about the extravagant pay that the nurses were probably getting, and go on to suggest what vast profits the Y.M.C.A. must be making out of its huts. Wherever the contrary had not been proved to their own senses, the slacking, self-seeking and shirking that had muddled and spoilt their own training for war until they were put, half-trained, in the hottest of the fire must be assumed to be in authority everywhere. Long ago, perhaps, the commons of England may, on the whole, have accepted the view that while they were the fists of her army there was a strong brain somewhere behind, as good at its job as the fists were at theirs; that above them, using them for the best, mind was enthroned, mind the deviser, adapter, foreseer, the finder of ever new means to new ends, mind which knew better than fists, and from which, in any time of trial, all good counsels and provident works were sure to proceed. If so, the faith of the general mass of the English common people in any such division of functions was now pretty near its last kick. The lions felt they had found out the asses. They would not try to throw off the lead of the asses just then: you cannot reorganize a fire-brigade in the midst of a fire. That had to wait. They worked grimly on at the job of the moment, resigned for the present to seeing all the things go ill which the great ones of their world ought to have caused to go well. For themselves, in each of their units, they saw what was coming. Some day soon they would be put into an attack and would come out with half their numbers or, perhaps, two-thirds, and nothing gained for England, perhaps because some old Regular in his youth had preferred playing polo to learning his job. The rest would be brought up to strength with half-trained drafts and then put in again, and the process would go on over and over again until our commanders learnt war, and then perhaps we might win, if any of us were left.