Above all it should be remembered that soldiers are not schoolboys, or mere tools, but men, often with high-strung feelings, who have put their lives at the disposal of their country. The British soldier is essentially a practical man; he has, in peace time, been an engineer, a boiler-maker, an electrician, a mason, a farmer, or in a score of other trades, and he does not easily lose the character of his long training; nor should we expect it. He wants to be considered seriously, and as a man. He wants to do his best, within reason, and, given a fair chance, he never fails you. And, finally, he considers he has the right, at all times, to be the keeper of his own soul. Leadership imposes a wide knowledge of human nature, and a wide responsibility; but tact, great patience, and a durable enthusiasm will carry one far on an undertaking that is full of difficulties. CRITICISM A soldier said to me the other day: “I have been fifteen months out here—I may be fifteen more—I may be shot to-morrow.” To him it was a commonplace remark without a note of complaint. He merely wished to show he had had time to think of the subject he was discussing from a serious point of view. And he had been discussing the folly, the uselessness, the narrowness, the meanness of some of the newspaper and political criticisms so rife in his home papers—the home that now he passionately hoped would emerge from bloody battle-fields purified, serious, content, and aged to a greater wisdom. He thought some journalism at home and, incidentally, politics had been, since the date of war, very disappointing. War had brought the golden opportunity, while the State was in trouble and distress, to raise the standard of thought to high Idealism. Yet had it carried on, on the whole, as before, the chief forte criticism; sometimes uttered in weak alarm or blundering foreboding—always in attack or defence of a narrow circumstance. [Sidenote: DISTURBING CRITICISM] And, having warmed to his subject, the soldier went on to condemn criticism—and his arguments were these: There is far too much freedom of field given to fractious, unfounded criticism. Criticism is nearly always, in some aspect, unjust; certainly it is always unkind. For it aims at striking a down-felling blow while it hits but one surface of the many-sided views of complex humanity. The surface that is struck at may be bruised or even destroyed, if the blow be straight, but there are others of the many surfaces which will merely recoil and revolt, with cause, against the blow. And there are times when the blow misses the mark altogether, and revolt is complete from all sides.