The brigadier was a regular soldier and nothing but a soldier from head to foot, in thought, in manner and in his decisive phrases. Nowadays, when we seem to be drawing further and further away from versatility, perhaps more than ever we like the soldier to be a soldier, the poet to be a poet, the surgeon to be a surgeon; and I can even imagine this brigadier preferring that if another man was to be a pacifist he should be a real out and out pacifist. You knew at a glance without asking that he had been in India and South Africa, that he was fond of sport and probably fond of fighting. He had rubbed up against all kinds of men, as the British officer who has the inclination may do in the course of his career, and his straight eye--an eye which you would say had never been accustomed to indefiniteness about anything--must have impressed the men under his command with the confidence that he knew his business and that they must follow him. Yet it could twinkle on occasion with a pungent humor as he told his story, which did not take him long but left you long a-thinking. A writer who was as good a writer as he was a soldier if he had had the same experience could have made a book out of it; but then he could not have been a man of action at the same time. He made it clear at once that he had not led his brigade in person over the parapet, or helped in person to bomb the enemy's dugouts, or indulged in any other kind of gallery play. I do not think that all the drawing-rooms in London or all the reception committees which receive gallant sons in their home towns could betray him into the faintest simulation of the pose of a hero. He was not a hero and he did not believe in heroics. His occupation was commanding men and taking trenches. Not once did he utter anything approaching a boast over a feat which his friends and superiors had expected of him. This would be "swank," as they call it, only he would characterize it by even a stronger word. He is the kind of officer, the working, clear-thinking type, who would earn promotion by success at arms in a long war, while the gallery-play crowd whose promotion and favors come by political gift and academic reports in time of peace would be swept into the dustbin. He was simply a capable fighter; and war is fighting.