My dreams have come true.'
One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in the increased
activity and alertness of our own people. The motto of to-day is, 'Let
those now work who never worked before, And those who always worked now
work the more.' Before the War we had a great national reputation for
idleness--in this island, at least. I remember a friendly critic from
Canada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much
disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with the
old country; that we had gone soft. As for our German critics, they
expressed the same view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not a
native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, so they could not
satirize us; but their caricatures of the typical Englishman showed us
what they thought. He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was
dressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been worth their while to
notice what they did not notice, that his muscles and nerves are not
soft. They learned that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke
the Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison.
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