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The remains of the camp gave very good cover for any sniper who wanted to approach our line. As I was not a soldier it did not occur to me that the same might be true in the opposite direction. Had I been a soldier I might have wanted to go in the opposite direction, but as I was only a public school boy dressed up as a soldier, complete with decoration, I had not the necessary resources. I felt, secretly, that my morale was bad.
Nowadays I would not make such a simple diagnosis, but as it was I was impelled to prove my courage – the lack of it being, as I thought, my main defect. This erroneous idea was, and still is, generally held. Cromwell knew there was something wrong with his armies. He was opposed by a great man, Prince Rupert, who had courage and a high morale, but temperamentally was an amateur and could not see his problem in any terms other than those of the amateur outlook. Cromwell, who might appear to be even more of an amateur, was temperamentally a professional; his approach to his material, the ‘decayed tapsters and serving men’, was characteristically professional. He saw that, coming into a situation which he, like Rupert, had inherited, something had to be done to remedy the past and forestall the future. Rupert had a cause, the Royalist cause: Cromwell had a religion and a God. The god of the Royalist cause was a poor specimen of human being who, despite all his attempts and those of his later followers at sanctification, could only reform, too late, radically poor material which in fact remained the poor stuff it was. That was a bad start for Rupert's foundations. Patriotism, Edith Cavell discovered much later, was not enough. On this foundation Rupert failed to erect the necessary structure for an army at war.