As I walked through the village I came upon a number of miners lounging around, with, apparently, nothing to do. They were, they informed me, working afternoon "core" that week, and thus had their mornings at liberty. They greeted me heartily as I came up, and willingly entered into conversation with me. The subject of conversation was the war, and the two things which impressed me were, first of all, that it would soon be over, and, second, that they had nothing to do with it. In the majority of cases they did not seem to feel that Lord Kitchener's appeal was to them at all. They imagined that soldiers would be forthcoming, and that England would be able to get all the men she wanted, but the idea that they should leave their homes and go away for training did not seem to occur to them. I am speaking now of those early days of the war, before the terror of it really gripped the country.
"I d'give they Germans about six weeks," said one miner to me. "What can Germany do 'gainst Russia and France and we? I tell you what, maaster, they have bite off a bigger piece than they can chow, tha's what they've done; do'ant you think so?"
"I hope they have," I replied; "but I think you are over-confident. You see, in Germany, every man is trained to be a soldier, and thus they have an army nearly twenty times as big as we have."
"But you do'ant think they'll bait we, do 'ee, maaster?"
"I think we shall have difficult work to beat them," was my reply, "and the sooner you chaps enlist the better."
"What! we go for sojers; do'ant you believe it. I never fired a gun in my life."
"Then I think the sooner you begin to learn the better."
But I could make no impression on them. The war, to them, was a long way off, and they had only a kind of detached interest in it. They quite agreed with me that, as we were in it, we should have to see it through, only some one else must see it through, not they. The thought of their becoming soldiers seemed utterly alien to them. I discovered, too, that all of them had a kind of feeling that they would lower themselves in the social grade if they donned the King's uniform. In the past, the Army had largely been recruited from men of the extreme lower orders. Of course, I am referring now to privates. When a young fellow got into trouble, or had disgraced himself in any way, the Army was a kind of harbor of refuge. Indeed, it was quite common for magistrates to give incipient criminals the choice between joining the Army and being sent to prison. As a consequence, these Cornish miners, who in their way were exceedingly proud, thought it beneath them to don the King's uniform. Besides, as Mr. Lethbridge had said on a previous occasion, the whole spirit of the county was utterly alien to anything like militarism.