In English views of the war and in its conduct this was evident. The English soldiers were better looked after and better treated than those of other armies. The sanitary service and military hygiene were particularly good. The claims of “conscientious objectors,” opponents of war on religious and ethical grounds, were very liberally admitted. Besides, the English published trustworthy news of the war and did not suppress enemy opinions.
Is all this bound up with England’s wealth? No European city seems so rich as London. I walked and rode through its length and breadth, in all directions. Almost everywhere the door handles were in good order, the many brass plates of business houses well polished, garden fences well kept—these things showed me the wealth of England more clearly than any statistical figures.
The Cinema Spirit.
In London, as elsewhere, I went to the cinema to see war films. They showed every side of war technique, from the initial stages in factories and dockyards up to the life in the trenches. The French pictures were mostly political; and though the French and the English public both liked appeals to sentiment, the English and the American films were less mournful than those of France. I noticed, too, in London, and later on in America, that when portraits of political and military personages were thrown on the screen, the loudest applause was always given to the King of the Belgians, louder, in fact, than to Joffre and Foch. In England, as in America, it was for Belgium that the people had gone into the war. In the cinemas I realized, moreover, that in modern English literature all novels, even those of Hardy and Meredith, have a strong strain of the cinematograph spirit, a preference for mysteries and complicated plots of the detective story type. True, in the older French literature, in Balzac, for example, the novel is already a detective story. While the Germans and we ourselves, led and perverted by the Russians, analyse the soul and dig out of it what is weird and morbid, the English and the Americans are always simpler. Puzzles of a more mechanical sort interest them, though they also have managed to spoil their minds with modern theories, problems and superproblems, and even with Freud’s ridiculous psychology. Take, for instance, Mr. Lawrence, who sometimes seems like Barbusse and Jaeger!
