Many, we are told, will anticipate the inconceivable by making their own adventures, if not their own war on society, such are the brutalising effects of war! In this proposition there is probably as much as a grain of truth to a sandhill of imbecility; but we shall hear of that grain on all sides; the soldier-criminal will be only too certain of a copious press, the bombing burglar of his headline. The people we are not going to hear about, and have no desire to recognise as such, are the rascals reformed, the weak men strengthened, the prodigals born again in this war, and at least less likely to die a second death-in-life. With all my heart I believe that, with few exceptions, the only characters which will have suffered by the war are those of such youngish men as have managed to stand out of it to the end, and men of all ages and all conditions who have failed throughout to put their personal considerations in their pockets, and left it to other men and other men's sons to die or bleed for them. I hope they are not more numerous than the men who have been 'brutalised' by war. At all events there were no successful shirkers about our huts in France; and that may have made the atmosphere what it was. All might not have the heart for war; here and there some sapient head might wag aloof; but at least all had their lives and bodies in the cause, there were no safe skins, no cold detachment, no complacent lookers-on. It was an atmosphere of manhood the more potent for the plain fact that no man regarded himself as such in any marked degree, or for one moment in the light of a hero. That is all I have to say about their heroism. It is an absolute, like the beauty of Venus or the goodness of God. Daily and hourly they are rising to heights that keep all the world always wondering--when, indeed, it does not kill the power of wonderment. But their dead level, the level on which I saw them every day, lies high enough for me. It is not only what discipline has done for them, not only what the habit of sacrifice has made of them, that appeals and must appeal to the older man privileged to mix with soldiers at the front. It is also the wonderful quality of his fellow-countrymen as revealed in these tremendous years. That was there all the time, but it took the war to show it up, it took the war to make us see it. I might have known that rough poor lads were reading Ruskin and Carlyle, that a Northamptonshire shoemaker was as likely as anybody else to be steeped in Charles Lamb, or a telegraph-clerk and his wife to tramp the Yorkshire dales with Wordsworth and Keats about their persons. Yet I, for one, more shame for me! would never have imagined such men if the God of battles had not put me to school in my Rest Hut for one short half-term.