“How great and glorious is the British Army!” he said. “How immense are the power and majesty of the temporary lieutenant! For four years and a half we have fought to crush militarism. Nine hundred thousand men of ours have died explosive deaths in order to abolish the philosophy of Zabernism--you remember!--the claim of the military caste to the servility of civilian salutes. Two million men of ours are blind, crippled, shell-shocked, as martyrs for democracy made free of Junkerdom by the crushing of the Hun. Now, by a slight error in logic (the beautiful inconsistency of our English character!) we arrest, fine, or imprison any German man or child who does not bare his head before a little English subaltern from Peckham Rye or Tooting in a Gor’blimy cap! How great and good we are! How free from hypocrisy! How splendid our victory for the little peoples of the earth!” Young Harding, who had been returning salutes solemnly and mechanically to great numbers of Germans, flushed a little. “I suppose it’s necessary to enforce respect. All the same, it’s a horrid bore.” Fortune wagged his hand behind his ear to an elderly German who took off his bowler hat. The man stared at him in a frightened way, as though the English officer had suddenly gone mad and might bite him. “Strange!” said Fortune. “Not yet have they been taught the beauty of the Guards’ salute. That man ought to be put into a dark cell, with bread and water, and torture from 9 a.m. till mid-day, on Wednesdays and Fridays.” Fortune was vastly entertained by the sight of British soldiers walking about with German families in whose houses they were billeted. Some of them were arm-in-arm with German girls, a sergeant-major was carrying a small flaxen-haired boy on whose sailor’s cap was the word “_Vaterland_.” “Disgraceful!” said Fortune, looking sternly at Harding. “In spite of all our atrocity tales, our propaganda of righteous hate, our training of the young idea that a Hun must be killed at sight--‘the only good German is a dead German,’ as you remember, Harding--these soldiers of ours are fraternising with the enemy and flirting with the enemy’s fair-haired daughters, and carrying infant Huns shoulder-high. Look at that sergeant-major forgetting all my propaganda. Surely he ought to cut the throat of that baby Hindenburg? My heart aches for Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche. All his work undone. All his fury fizzled. Sad! sad!”