Since every man that fires guns or drives them in France--that is, some hundred thousand and more at any one time, and taking in reserves, half a million--must go to camp in his time, and that more than once, it seems monstrous that a boy should make so much of it; but then to a boy six months is a little lifetime, and for six months I had passed through that great annealing fire of drill which stamps and moulds the French people to-day, putting too much knowledge and bitterness into their eyes, but a great determination into their gestures and a trained tenacity into the methods of their thought. To me also this fire seemed fiercer and more transforming because, until the day when they had marched me up to barracks in the dark and the rain with a batch of recruits, I had known nothing but the easy illusions and the comfort of an English village, and had had but journeys or short visits to teach me that enduring mystery of Europe, the French temper: whose aims and reticence, whose hidden enthusiasms, great range of effort, divisions, defeats, and resurrections must now remain the principal problem before my mind; for the few who have seen this sight know that the French mind is the pivot on which Europe turns. I had come into the regiment faulty in my grammar and doubtful in accent, ignorant especially of those things which in every civilisation are taken for granted but never explained in full; I was ignorant, therefore, of the key which alone can open that civilisation to a stranger. Things irksome or a heavy burden to the young men of my age, born and brought up in the French air, were to me, brought up with Englishmen an Englishman, odious and bewildering. Orders that I but half comprehended; simple phrases that seemed charged with menace; boasting (a habit of which I knew little), coupled with a fierce and, as it were, expected courage that seemed ill suited to boasting--and certainly unknown outside this army; enormous powers of endurance in men whose stature my English training had taught me to despise; a habit of fighting with the fists, coupled with a curious contempt for the accident of individual superiority--all these things amazed me and put me into a topsy-turvy world where I was weeks in finding my feet.