"I'm not complaining. I dislike all popular songs. 'Lillibullero' drove my king out of Ireland, and the 'Marseillaise' drove the Church out of France. Democracy in the ascendant has a taste for songs, and I don't like democracy in the ascendant. But that's all by the way. I'm thinking of the comedy of life—Germany with her 'Wacht am Rhein' prodding her soldiers into battle with a bayonet, and ourselves with our own methods. A pretty scene, you know: five men and four women—all drunk. Three of the men plastered with the penny flags of the patriotic life, two of them actually in uniform and ready to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and avenge Louvain—who'd heard of Louvain before it was sacked?—the women all drunk on a separation allowance. And they stand nine abreast, shouting a music-hall song and looking at a poster that says, 'Women of England, is your best boy in khaki?' If you're fool enough ever to fight, I suppose you're doubly a fool for trying to keep some dignity in the business." He sighed perplexedly. "I dare say it's no worse than the 'Wacht am Rhein' and the bayonet—material absolutism against uneducated democracy."
"Is there anything in the world you think worth fighting for?" I asked, as I handed him his coffee.
"Any ideal."
"The democracy won't always be uneducated."
"It will as long as you and I have anything to do with it," he answered. "As a caste we're played out, George, and our only hope of power is to keep people's stomachs full and their heads empty. For God's sake don't perpetrate the hypocrisy of imagining we're an intelligenza with those posters in sight. I've been thinking a bit in camp lately, George."
"Do you fire these views off in mess?" I asked.
"To a handful of schoolboys who think war's the greatest fun in the world? No! But it makes you think when you see a pasty-faced clerk dragged from his office-stool, given a chest, turned into a man and then flung across the Channel to be blown limb from limb. I don't think it's worth it unless we've got some ideal—hardly worth praying to be 'slightly wounded,' which, I understand, is the ambition of every man over thirty. I see the opportunity, but I don't see anyone ready to grasp it."
"A lot depends on the length of the war," I suggested.
I had in mind the lessons of South Africa and the incorrigible buoyancy of the English temperament. If the war ended in a week, there would be found jaunty spirits to explain that their victory was won without preparation, all in the day's work, that they had pottered over to the Front to kill time before the opening of the London Season. In their rush back to the old life they would be accompanied by everyone who boasted what he would do or buy a drink on the day peace was signed. A longer war with its swelling casualty lists might chasten the temper of England, or equally it might provoke a Merveilleuses reaction and set men harking back to the fashions of "the good old days" before the fourth of August.