knew everyone of the two hundred names, and she felt that nothing less than gold would do, so the crosses were irregular.

―

John Harding, Thomas Mason, Richard Smith there was a cross against Richard Smith. They were really Jack and Tom and Dick in the village, only being in church and on a roll of honor makes a difference. They had idled and worked in the village, and played cricket on the common, and kept rabbits, and thrown stones into the pond where the gray geese earned their own living. And Richard Smith Dick of the village had been killed in Palestine-a place with which the village was far more familiar than with all those foreign names; and Tom and Jack were in France, and Tom's mother said he was always so handy about the house, nothing he could n't do, and she told Dick's mother-Richard Smith, who was killed in Palestine that she ought to be thankful her Dick could n't feel cold and wet and miserable any more. And Dick's mother went to church, and her throat tightened when she looked at the Roll of Honor and at Richard Smith with a gold cross beside it. And wives and girls went to church and looked at the Roll of Honor made by the vicar's daughter, and the wives prayed for their husbands and the girls for their lovers, yet when a gold cross was added to the roll there was, all the same, a shock of surprise that such things from distant lands-should reach Fotheringham with its gray geese and its common and its pond and the white blackthorn beside the pond. The Roll of Honor said confidently that it was sweet to die for your country- the village did not make much of Latin-sweet, when you were young and strong like Jack and Tom and Dick of the village, and

liked cricket and girls and ferrets and the cottage on the edge of the common with its garden full of crocuses and daffodils and primroses. Dick did not mean to die for anybody when he set out on his last crusade. That was reserved for Richard Smith.

Some day Richard Smith's name with those of his comrades would be translated into stone and would look down from the wall of the new little church new no longer and filled with historic memory and sleepy children would think of Thomas Mason, not as a human boy who had thrown stones into the gray goose pond, but as a monument, a piece of graven stone something to arrest their roving eye. The casual passer-by would enter the coolness of the oldnew church and would read the names of the men - Thomas Mason was a man, even if Tom was only a boyof the village of Fotheringham who had laid down their lives in the Great European war for the cause of freedom, and that it was sweet to die for one's country. And he would have visions of martial music and serried bayonets and helmeted warriors; of women standing at their doors, their children on their arm, waving their handkerchiefs, and all the time it would only have been Jack and Tom and Dick of the village who went away to foreign parts. And perhaps the vicar's daughter of the period would, with sudden thought, put some daffodils to commemorate the heroes of the great European war, the men who saved the England of the primroses and the little purple daphne and the gray geese upon the common. But she would think of them as men, as heroes, because their names were graven in stone in the church, and not as boys who threw stones and liked girls and were out for adventure and suffered and died some in

pain, some who had n't meant to die at all and could not realize the thing that was to come upon them. And she would not know that the agony of one age is the romance of the next; that those who suffer know not romance, and that those who know romance know not suffering; that

The Manchester Guardian

the two never meet and never know; she would not know that Tom and Jack and Dick would have laughed and blushed and looked awkward if they could have seen little children looking at their names with wide eyes and being told that they were heroes.

WHEN, years hence, the world at peace has leisure to cast its final profit and loss account of the great war, this much, at least, there will be to set against all its burden of sorrow and suffering and waste, that millions of men from far flung lands have been taught to know each other better, to take from experience a broader and a clearer view of life than they could ever have learned from books or preachers. Something has surely been accomplished, for nations as for individuals, to remove the barriers of class and creed and caste, to eradicate some of the primordial human instincts, born of ages of ignorance and prejudice. You cannot work or fight for four years in a good cause side by side with your fellow man, be he white or yellow or brown, without discovering in him some unsuspected virtues, and making friendly allowance for the fact that he was born in a strange land.

For example: millions of Britons. from the homeland and overseas (besides Frenchmen and Americans), who have made the acquaintance of

the Chinese coolie corps in France, will, hereafter, have a far better conception of things Chinese and a kindlier feeling for the sons of Hau than they had evolved in the past, from the history of our China wars or lurid tales of the Boxer rising, or memories of that shameless party-cry which won an election in England not so long ago. 'East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,' sings Kipling. It is a sweeping judgment, and, like all such, unjust for all its foundation of truth. For what more does it amount to, after all, than recognition of the elemental race barrier, of the eternal antagonisms of creed and color, that underlie the struggle for survival on this perplexing planet? Eighteen years ago, when the Allies were marching on Peking under the leadership of the mailed fist, what would have been said or done to the man who prophesied that thousands of the next generation of Boxers would cross the seas to serve the cause of the Allies in France against that same mailed fist?

Thoughts of these things were in

my mind one day, not long since, when it was given to me to witness the foregathering of East and West, under peculiarly interesting conditions, at the Havre. To be precise, the day was Thursday, the 13th of June. It was a day of no particular importance in our calendar, but to the Chinese it was the fifth day of the fifth moon, and, therefore, the Festival of the Dragon. For the ten thousand coolies who labor unceasingly at the discharge of ships' cargoes and other war work in and about the old Norman port, it was high holiday. You, who have followed in the press from afar the earth-shaking triumphs of young China under the Republic, who have heard that since the revolution the Chinese Government has adopted the Western calendar, together with frock coats, votes for women, and all the rest of it, you may object that the Dragon Festival went by the board. together with the Manchu dynasty and pigtails and the trimetrical classic. No doubt it did, on paper, for the edification of diplomats, financiers, and missionaries, and for the greater glory of a handful of predatory politicans at Peking. But for the toiling masses of the Chinese people the Dragon Festival remains nevertheless a national institution, no more to be abolished by presidential mandate than the canons of Confucius, or the growing of opium, or the binding of lilyfeet in maidens. It is an ancient people and it loveth ancient things; and so, on the fifth day of the fifth moon (prehistoric style) it continues as of old to collect and pay its debts and to do other seemly and seasonable things to celebrate the memory of a certain virtuous Minister of State who, because of rottenness in high places, committed suicide (thus runs the legend) about 450 B.C. It is of no importance that the name of this

superior man has long since been forgotten: the sons of Hau are quite content to do reverence to the dim and distant memory of such a phenomenon, and to persevere, after the patient, unquestioning manner of their race, in their annual quest for his mortal remains.

For the sturdy natives of Shantung who, by their presence and their labor of days, now testify in France to the fact that the East has heard the West a-calling, this celebration of the Dragon Festival was necessarily somewhat of a makeshift and a compromise. It lacked the central features of dragon-bouts, paper money, and that ancient symbolic ritual, wherewith the faithful are wont to go forth, to seek the mortal coil of him who lived and died a model mandarin. But it is an essential tenet of Chinese philosophy to like what you can get when you cannot get what you would like, and the leave-squads of highly cheerful coolies, who pervaded the busy streets of the Havre that Thursday morning, found many joys to compensate them for the privations of exile. In the first place, they were all well clothed, well paid, and well fed; enjoying, in fact, a state of bodily well-being to which no coolies in China would ever hope to aspire. Do not the ever generous (if somewhat undiscriminating) authorities at Whitehall provide these Asiatics with meat three times a day, not to mention bread, rice, vegetables, sugar, cheese, and all the other things that go to the making of British war rations? When Wang Ching-fu and his friends return in due season to the unseasoned rice bowl of lean seasons in Shantung they will, at least, have known three unforgettable years of fatness beyond the dreams of gluttony, and with the blissful certainty of ample daily bread, each man receives a franc a day,

over and above the maintenance allowance paid to his family in China.

A Dragon Festival, unmarred by household bills, without the cus-, tomary visits to pawnbrokers and usurers; a festival with money to burn and a town full of good things to buy withal no wonder that the little groups of coolies were grinning as one man amidst the fearful joys of dumb-show shopping, making the ancient streets of the Havre resound with strange, cheerful noises of the East. One man I met in the Public Gardena flat-nosed, genial fellow of the Sancho Panza type carrying with infinite pride a bunch of red peonies, one of the few flowers in the Havre market to remind these exiles of springtime in their native land, a flower very appropriate, by classical tradition, for the celebration of the festival. He was a strange vision, this son of Hau, still wearing on his feet the native cotton shoes of Shantung, his legs bedecked with khaki puttees and on his head a saucy Homburg hat. Sniffing ecstatically at his peonies, he was heading for the tramway that would take him back to camp, all oblivious of the strangeness of the world about him, quite unconscious of his own fantastic presence in it. Around and about him, enjoying their hour of ease and their place in the sun, were fighting men from all the four corners of the earth Belgians and Russians (flotsam, these, now working at munitions), Americans and Australians, Britishers of every description, Indians and Portuguese

not to mention a cheerful contingent of Waacs' and Wrens'- a very kaleidoscopic epitome of the history of the war. But the man from Shantung went his way through that sun-flecked garden as if all these were but fleeting shadows on the Painted Veil, as if he himself and his peonies

were the only realities. His Oriental soul was evidently worlds away, either lost in memories of bygone days or weaving roseate dreams about the coming flash.

Coming up softly from behind, I asked in his own tongue how much he had given for the flowers and what he was going to do with them?

You cannot surprise the East; its imperturbability is inbred, elemental, the result of centuries of fatalism, not merely a defensive armor like that of the Scot. Without surprise, without even an indication of mild interest, but with the serene courtesy of his race, he replied that the flowers had cost him two days' pay-two 'flancs,' as he put it. As for their purpose, was not the tapir aware that this was the fifth day of the fifth moon? There was to be a special big chow-chow at the camp that evening, and what could be more suitable to the occasion than peonies? Whereupon, we fell to talking. It was good work and good living in France, he said. By the end of his three years, fourteen months hence, he hoped to have saved many dollars. Perhaps, if the war was not over by then, he would sign on again. But was it true, as he had heard, that there was trouble also in China? Had there been looting of cities by bandits in Shantung? Was his family in any danger at Wei-hai-wei? It is worthy of note that, in his opinion, the middle kingdom will know no lasting peace until the old order is reëstablished with the Dragon Throne and all foolish talkers forcibly suppressed. Why, he asked, did not England help. to put down the pirates and robbers. who make the Chinese people to eat bitterness?

On our way to the labor camp we met one of the Coolie Companies celebrating the occasion by a full-dress procession, headed by its flag, all

very pleased and proud. Also we met a regiment of American troops in full marching order, and again, further on, some squads of German prisoners under escort, returning to work. My Chinese friend paid no attention to the Germans; but the Americans drew speech from the depths of his philosophic detachment. Those are overseas men,' he observed; they are going to help the French to fight.' Then, after a pause and incidentally, as if recording an axiom, he added, 'We Chinese do not fight.' It was said complacently, but there was, nevertheless, an unmistakable implication of superior wisdom. And to my mind there came a swift mind-picture of China as she is to-day, and as she has been so often in the past, her millions of non-fighters once more the prey of lawlessness and rapine, 'Whose harvest the hungry eateth up and the robber swalloweth up their substance.' And I wondered whether there is much to choose in the end between the grim casualty lists of our own machine-made civilization and that of the dream-fed patriarchal system of the East. Our poets and philosophers have been over-prone to realize Matthew Arnold's lotus-eating moon, that Orient which

the day (which made my humble meat card a thing of derision), I was returning to the Hotel de Normandie, through the Place Gambetta, where the masts of the fishing smacks look down upon the flower-sellers' stalls, when I came across another group of coolies, standing outside a shop just where the main street begins. They were earnestly trying, by means of much eloquent gesture, to explain something to Madame la propriétaire. Madame had given it up. Their pantomime had suggested a toothbrush, but this had been rejected by the whole strength of the company. My services as interpreter having been accepted, it transpired that what was wanted was a mouth-organ, 'to make pleasant sounds for our festival.' One of the coolies was the proud possessor of a native fiddle, another had a tin whistle; only the organ was needed to complete the orchestra. Alas, there was no such instrument to be found in all the town.

In the matter of headgear, the King's regulations appear to allow the Labor Battalions a latitude which expresses itself in fancy. The result detracts somewhat from their collective dignity; their motley promiscuity reminded me of early days in Japan, what time the sons of the Samurai first took to experiments in the garb of Western civilization, and their traders imported miscellaneous cargoes of second-hand hats from London and New York.

And, in conclusion, be it said that, as regards their morals and manners and general conduct, these humble recruits in the ranks of the Allies have won golden opinions on all sides.