although most of the wounded were their foes.

Presently Private Brown became aware that the nuns had arrived at his stretcher. Their compassionate eyes surveyed him. They tried to attend to him, to give him food and water. It was useless. He was too far gone for their ministrations. He saw them confer together. Then they went and fetched screens, and placed them round his stretcher, fencing it off from the rest of the church; and within this little sanctuary they lit candles.

I tell you this incident exactly as Private Brown told it to me. To him, a Protestant, the nuns' action had no definite meaning. Nevertheless, it impressed him. It galvanized his weakening faculties. What psychological effect it had upon him I shall not presume to analyze. I record the facts and let them speak for themselves. Here was poor Private Brown, whose sufferings for days past had been indescribable, who had twice undergone an amputation, whose stump was rotting, who was in the hands of the enemy, and who was about as near death as it is possible for man to be without dying. .

'Well,' he said, 'when I saw them nuns put the screens round me and light them candles, I said to myself, I said, "This is getting beyond a joke."

Voilà! That was (and is) Private Brown's opinion. It was getting beyond a joke. And that opinionso superb is the power of mind over matter- saved Private Brown's life. He determined that he would not die. He did not die. He very nearly died, both then and afterwards. But he did not. He is alive at this minute, with a wooden leg and a wide grin. Getting beyond a joke! Oh, my dear simple hero, you are the Briton

typified: if a lack of a sense of humor could lose wars, you would have lost this one long ago; but a sense of humor is a cheap accomplishment compared with the practical, solid virtues which have built you into the man you are. You made me laugh, Private Brown, but there was a lump in my throat. I remind myself of the thousands of other Private Browns, now stolidly stemming the flood of Germans, and I fancy the enemy beginning to echo you, and saying 'This is getting beyond a joke.'

It was in August 1915 that the first batch of British exchanged wounded prisoners were sent from Germany to England. Only those who were deemed incapable of further service were allowed to come, and a lamentable crew of phantoms most of them turned out to be. They were drafted direct into English military hospitals for rest and treatment. The hospital at which I was working had the honor of receiving three hundred of them. Their arrival was a sight never to be forgotten. Dusk had fallen, and the great central hall into which they were brought, before they were sorted into the various wards, presented a macabre and moving spectacle: its rows of incandescent gas lamps, which left the arched ceiling in profound darkness, threw downwards, upon the scene below, an almost theatrical glare. And what a scene it was! The hall is furnished with beds, fifty of them, but the beds were far too few we orderlies, carrying in the stretchers, had filled the beds and could have filled them over and over again: at the end there was nothing for it but to range the stretchers on the floor. Not that this is in itself unusual: a war hospital often has its organization momentarily upset by an extra large intake of wounded. That hall of ours has been packed with

:

men crippled with a rheumatism as cruel as any wound-all these are an everyday affair, with us, in that hall. But this mournful procession of stretchers, which looked as though it would never cease, continually adding to the ghastly assemblage under the gas lamps, seemed different. Never, not once, in three years' experience of the reception of wounded, have I seen such deplorable specimens as were some of these. I say 'some' of these, for I cannot and will not subscribe to the assertion that all our wounded had been illtreated and starved when taken prisoners to Germany. I entered into hurried conversations with a considerable number, and their testimony differed it was manifest that the treatment in some internment camps had been worse than in others. Documentary evidence was taken: and the question is, in any case, outside my purview. I simply record, as an eye-witness, that the emaciation of some of these wounded was heartbreaking. There were several who lay upon their stretchers like waxen images, shrunken and white, their glittering eyes the only live thing visible. There were several who were led into the hall-blind: their appearance the more touching by reason of the ragbag clothes in which their captors had elected to rig themclothes not merely ill-fitting, but made additionally uncouth by tags of gaudy-colored tape, sewn on the shoulders and elsewhere, to stamp the wearer as a prisoner in the event

of his escape. Others there were who had been neglected very wickedly: the odor which arose from their poor bodies told its story. But what brought us all so near to weeping was less the extremity of their case than the happiness which illumined them. Their joy was indeed tear-compelling. They were home again-free! England at last; and English voices; Englishwomen tending them; English orderlies jesting with them and gently lifting them; English doctors examining them; English food and drink offered them; English wards and English beds and clean linen English sheets and pillows for their tired limbs! England. . . . ! Wearily yet luxuriously they fingered the little bouquets of English roses which had been proffered by English girls at the railway station. England. . . . !

Many of those released captives dreamed again of Germany that night. The night nurses testified of how they had cried out in their sleep; then wakened, trembling, and been soothed, and had lain back with a poignant sigh of contentment and relief. Only a dream! The reality was-England! One Northerner, in his sleep, was thinking of his homeland: over and over again he murmured the words 'Bonny Scotland, bonny Scotland!' One sat up in bed with a scream 'Leave me alone!' Then, seeing where he was, hysterically gasped to the rest of the ward 'It's all right, boys: we're safe!' However. !

On the morrow frail human nature reannounced itself in at least one instance. A certain John Bull, who had told how he was starved in his German camp-and, heaven knows, he was very likely telling the truthwas brought the usual hospital breakfast, of which one item is porridge. Porridge! He would have none of it.

Protesting vigorously against the meanness of our official diet, he opened a small parcel which he had brought with him from Germany and produced a specimen of the Fatherland's salted herring. This he ate. English 'grub' wasn't good enough.

But 'grub' always is a ticklish question with that prince of grousers, John Bull. Not even Armageddon will cure him of his penchant for grousing about his 'grub.' The rations of Tommy Atkins are, as a matter of fact, conceived on a generous scale. Unless they are badly administered, they are ample in quantity and excellent in quality. Yet nothing will persuade their recipients that it is not proper to grumble at them. Our friend from Germany was, after all, merely upholding a tradition, doing the correct thing, behaving in character: only the circumstances caused one to be taken aback at his consistency to type However. . . . !

People tell me that our mentality is being ominously modified by the war. We shall never be the same again. We shall never return to our old ways. And I hope-in some things-that we shall not. Nevertheless my own observation rather contradicts this idea that men are changed by the hardships and heroisms of war; the assumption that a man who has faced the ordeal of the trenches, who has endured cold, filth, mud, incessant danger, who has accomplished what is really an extraordinary feat, namely, the killing of fellow creatures, who has survived the dreadful pain of, for instance, a shrapnel wound in the stomach, would come back with altered outlooks. Does he? Temperament is less lightly transformed. Hate and jealousy may alter a man, but physical suffering, unless continually sustained, leaves him in the

long run much as it found him. His body forgets. I have known a man deeply changed because the girl he loved would not marry him or because his wife was unfaithful. Those were wounds to the spirit. But wounds to the body are different, and often (if not always) leave the spirit unaltered, unless, of course, that mysterious gray matter which is encased within the skull has been impinged upon by the injury: then there is no saying what uncanny complications, psychical as well as physical, may ensue. 'G.S.W. in head': when this is the formula on the patient's case-sheet one would be surprised at nothing. But ‘G.S.W.' ('gun-shot wound') anywhere else means that the victim, in time, will emerge from the war very much the same person, foolish or wise, gentle or vicious, as he went in.

True, the nature of his wound may modify his after career, and therefore, by slow degrees, his character. The chief examples of this are found among the blinded patients. These men furnish forth the only examples I have met of a phenomenon which preachers always irritate me by dwelling on the spiritual discipline in suffering. Some of them seem genuinely to have profited by their affliction. Personally I would rather have my eyesight than an ocean of spiritual refinement, but perhaps, as no one has ever been in a position to make a choice between the two alternatives, this pronouncement is as rash as it is ribald. Suffice it to say that, of the many blinded soldiers whom I have encountered, I know of not one of whom I should not surmise that he is, broadly, a 'better' man than he was before. Even materially this has sometimes been, to one's astonishment, obvious. I know of one man who, before the war, held a

certain small position in a business. He lost his eyesight and, for a while, despaired. Attempts were made to teach him the usual blind-men's handicrafts, but he moped and failed to learn. Then the commanding officer of the institution in which this patient was harbored was seized with a bright idea. He got the blind man back into his former business: the employer was persuaded to give him a trial and place a secretary at his disposal. The blind man, who had previously been a mere hack at lowgrade pay, threw himself into the business with such zest, with such sharpened intelligence, that he has risen to a far more important position in the firm and is drawing-and is worth a salary which in former days he would not have dreamed of aspiring

to.

That is a true story. Here is another. It concerns a blinded soldier who was taught (as many are taught) the delicate art of massage. Before the war he was in an employment of a quite poor and rough sort: a 'job' such as he is now in would have been beyond his powers-the mere anatomical knowledge required would have been utterly outside the scope of his education. As a masseur, too, he is earning more money than he earned before the war. Look at him, and you see a contented man. He has good reason to be happy. On one of the first days that he ventured out alone in the streets his foot struck against the curb, and he fell down. A young woman stopped to pick him up. The pair entered into conversation. The young woman is now that blind man's wife. He has never seen her. She had never seen him before the day she hastened to his assistance. They are happily married. The husband has learned to play the violin. By means of music he has entered a

realm of culture of which it is highly improbable he would ever have caught a glimpse had he remained the illeducated citizen which he was before he lost his eyesight. It is improbable, similarly, that he would ever have made the acquaintance of, much less married, a wife of refinement. It is improbable that he would have earned so much money and had so comfortable a home.

...

However . . . as I say, the man is blind: and the spiritual and material compensations which that blindness has brought, comforting though they are, may furnish ammunition for the preachers aforementioned, but . . . well, did you ever hear the anecdote about the tactful soul who, seeing a fellow run over by a motor-'bus, came and offered him a chocolate cream? No? It is an anecdote I shall not inflict on you. I have mentioned enough to indicate its drift. I commend it to those optimists who declare that individually or in the mass we shall in any wise gain by the calamity which has overtaken Europe. Shall we? I could cite countless instances proving the affirmative. But, granting the gain, what was the cost? Granting the profit, what was the loss?

War is a tangle of paradoxes and incongruities: good where you least expect it, bad where it has promised to be noblest. Here in London I am told by one sort of observer that the spirit of the people is being exalted and purged of self-seeking and grossness; by another sort of observer that decadence and demoralization are rampant. We are improving. are degenerating. We are being uplifted. We are being vulgarized. Religious feeling is deepening. Flippancy and frivolity are everywhere. Sobriety is marked. Vice flourishes.

We

And doesn't it all sound to you rather like what might have been said

of London, by different types of wiseacres, any day these twenty years past? Yes, we are at war. It is hurting horribly. We are learning a lot-especially learning to take the measure of those fools who said, in their folly, that war was glorious. 'Glorious' is not an adjective with very much nourishment for the mourners and the starving, even when

The Nineteenth Century and After.

it is, as often, strictly relevant and justifiable. As well say 'absurd'; for 'absurd' covers a multitude of opposites the splendors of absurd heroisms, the ludicrousness of absurd illogicalities. War means Reason Dethroned, a sin unforgivable-he who causes us to commit it must be damned by gods and men. However. . . !

CHAPTER XII

'Is that you, maid?' Solomon, peering through the darkness, had caught sight of a female figure standing by the little wicket known as 'the top gate,' which gave access to the upper road, the light folds of its print dress showing between the fir trees. As Rosie did not move he went up to her and laid his hand kindly on her shoulder, being stricken with remorse as he felt it heave beneath his touch.

'Come, come, no need to be so down-hearted, my dear,' he said with increasing kindness. 'There, things have a-gone wrong all day, have n't they? Maybe ye did get out o' bed the wrong side this marnen along o' not bein' wishful to disturb Granma.'

'Oh, Mr. Blanchard. I wish I had n't stole out that way wi' Rufe,' sobbed Rosie. I've been punished for it.'

"There, I d' 'low ye have,' agreed Solomon remorsefully. 'I've a-been

hard with ye, I'll own that—but 't was along o' me bein' hurt in my own feelin's.'

He removed his hand from her shoulder and struck the gate gently with his open palm.

'Ye see,' he went on, 'I've a-been takin' a deal o' thought for you lately, and I did take it unkind as ye could n't spare a single thought for I.'

'Oh, but indeed I do, Mr. Blanchard. You-you did n't ought to judge me so hard.'

'Well, that's true,' he agreed. 'Us did n't ought to judge folks. Us did n't ought to be hard. Come, I'll try to have a bit more patience with both on ye. You'm young, an' you'm lovin', an' 't is naitral enough when you 're with your young man as ye should forget about the staid wold chap what's tryin' to be your friend.'

She noticed with a pang that he brushed aside her recent asseveration. 'As for he,' he went on, he 's young, an' he've a-got wild blood in