BATTLE IN THE MUD 283

cricket or foxhunting or an Oxford Common Room. English-
men were almost ready to die sooner than pass the port to the
right or omit a phrase of the customary chaff and larking that
attended the August Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath or
at Blackpool.

This curious and apparently unconscious capacity for attach-
ing individual effort to a corporate ideal embodied in group
ritual informed almost every activity of the nation's life. Hos-
pitals and charitable trusts like the City Companies transmitted
traditions as unchanging and proud as those of the Brigade of
Guards. Money-making abstractions like the Stock Exchange
and Lloyds and far humbler commercial concerns had their
sacred laws of the Medes and Persians unenforced by law yet
which no member would dream of breaking and which good
, men loved to honour. The very newspapers evolved their own
individual pride and code of honour: The Times was as much
a national institution as Convocation* or the House of Lords,
and its staff regarded it with the same affection as a Pomeranian
grenadier his regiment

Even schoolboys shared the national aptitude* The ritual,
increasingly hallowed by tradition, of a great public school was
as intricate and finely woven as a Beethoven sonata and aroused
in those who were subjected to it an affection which nothing
but death could eradicate. When the school songs were sung in
the Speech Room at Harrow grown and undemonstrative mea
—immersed in commerce or other individualistic pursuits—
would-let their eyes fill with tears in a surge of emotion which
reason could not explain but which was aa unconscious expres-
sion of their capacity for devotion to an undying ideal. In a
humbler social sphere Workmens' Colleges and Council Schools
began to gather traditions, and the ragged urchins of the street
evolved their own rough loyalties and rules of honour. Playing
for one's side was in the English blood It only needed the
alchemy of war and national peril to harness these diverse ea*
thusiasms and loyalties to the service of the community. For
when the Kaiser with his mailed fist threatened England, he did
not threaten England alone. He threatened the Fourth of June,
and the May Day choir on Magdalen Tower, and the village bon-
fire oo Guy Fawkes Night; the M.CLC. and the Reform Club;
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Ancient
Order of Buffaloes. Behind the easy facade of England there was