“He looks so like a fragment of civilian England, strayed incongruously into these warlike areas. One might say he smells of the comic paper, of the Music Hall, of the comic British workingman, were it not that there is a twist in the humour of it all that moves to other things than happy laughter . . . .

“It is a sorry jest that they, these unfit, the delvers of the earth, simple and twisted labourers with a Saxon faith in beer, should be the material in which war and the very great work out their soaring ambitions. . . . . But I am sometimes solaced by the feeling that their miseries are not very much grosser than those in which a grateful country found them when war made her cognisant of their civic existence.”