Part + 

II + 

The School of Courage + 

Early Days with the New Army + 

I + 

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The “Old Contemptibles” were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still “carried on” as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors were Regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the staffs of new divisions and to train the army of volunteers now being raised at home, and men who were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines: those, and noncommissioned officers who were the best schoolmasters of the new boys, the best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn in their courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the trenches said to me: “I am one out of 150 Regular officers still serving with their battalions. That is to say, there are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of 1,500.” + 

That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France by its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first August of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a festival, toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading them with fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit and training. As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden check by forces they had despised. They held their fire until the German ranks were within eight hundred yards of them, and then mowed them down as though by machine-gun fire⁠—before we had machine-guns, except as rare specimens, here and there. Our horse artillery was beyond any doubt the best in the world at that time. Even before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained⁠ ⁠… It was spent by the spring of ’15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took “the King’s shilling” and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier universal fame as a terrible warrior. There will never be a Regular Army like that. Modern warfare has opened the arena to the multitude. They may no longer sit in the Coliseum watching the paid gladiators. If there be war they must take their share of its sacrifice. They must be victims as well as victors. They must pay for the luxury of conquest, hatred, and revenge by their own bodies, and for their safety against aggression by national service. + 

After the first quick phases of the war this need of national soldiers to replace the professional forces became clear to the military leaders. The Territorials who had been raised for home defense were sent out to fill up the gaps, and their elementary training was shown to be good enough, as a beginning, in the fighting-lines. The courage of those Territorial divisions who came out first to France was quickly proved, and soon put to the supreme test, in which they did not fail. From the beginning to the end these men, who had made a game of soldiering in days of peace, yet a serious game to which they had devoted much of their spare time after working-hours, were splendid beyond all words of praise, and from the beginning to the end the Territorial officers⁠—men of good standing in their counties, men of brain and business training⁠—were handicapped by lack of promotion and treated with contempt by the High Command, who gave preference always to the Regular officers in every staff appointment. + 

This was natural and inevitable in armies controlled by the old Regular school of service and tradition. As a close corporation in command of the machine, it was not within their nature or philosophy to make way for the new type. The Staff College was jealous of its own. Sandhurst and Woolwich were still the only schools of soldiering recognized as giving the right “tone” to officers and gentlemen fit for high appointment. The cavalry, above all, held the power of supreme command in a war of machines and chemistry and national psychology.⁠ ⁠… + 

I should hate to attack the Regular officer. His caste belonged to the best of our blood. He was the heir to fine old traditions of courage and leadership in battle. He was a gentleman whose touch of arrogance was subject to a rigid code of honor which made him look to the comfort of his men first, to the health of his horse second, to his own physical needs last. He had the stern sense of justice of a Roman Centurian, and his men knew that though he would not spare them punishment if guilty, he would give them always a fair hearing, with a point in their favor, if possible. It was in their code to take the greatest risk in time of danger, to be scornful of death in the face of their men whatever secret fear they had, and to be proud and jealous of the honor of the regiment. In action men found them good to follow⁠—better than some of the young officers of the New Army, who had not the same traditional pride nor the same instinct for command nor the same consideration for their men, though more easygoing and human in sympathy. + 

So I salute in spirit those battalion officers of the Old Army who fulfilled their heritage until it was overwhelmed by new forces, and I find extenuating circumstances even in remembrance of the high stupidities, the narrow imagination, the deep, impregnable, intolerant ignorance of Staff College men who with their red tape and their general orders were the inquisitors and torturers of the new armies. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. They were molded in an old system, and could not change their cliché. + 

II + 

The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cities, every fence in rural places, was placarded with picture-posters. + 

… “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”⁠ ⁠… “What will your best girl say if you’re not in khaki?” + 

Those were vulgar appeals which, no doubt, stirred many simple souls, and so were good enough. It would have been better to let the people know more of the truth of what was happening in France and Flanders⁠—the truth of tragedy, instead of carefully camouflaged communiqués, hiding the losses, ignoring the deeds of famous regiments, veiling all the drama of that early fighting by a deliberate screen of mystery, though all was known to the enemy. It was fear of their own people, not of the enemy, which guided the rules of censorship then and later. + 

For some little time the British people did not understand what was happening. How could they know? It appeared that all was going well. Then why worry? Soon there would be the joy-bells of peace, and the boys would come marching home again, as in earlier wars. It was only very slowly⁠—because of the conspiracy of silence⁠—that there crept into the consciousness of our people the dim realization of a desperate struggle ahead, in which all their young manhood would be needed to save France and Belgium, and⁠—dear God!⁠—England herself. It was as that thought touched one mind and another that the recruiting offices were crowded with young men. Some of them offered their bodies because of the promise of a great adventure⁠—and life had been rather dull in office and factory and on the farm. Something stirred in their blood⁠—an old call to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, savage kind, for open-air life, fighting, killing, the comradeship of hunters, violent emotions, the chance of death, surged up into the brains of quiet boys, clerks, mechanics, miners, factory hands. It was the call of the wild⁠—the hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities of the world’s dawn, which is in the embryo of modern man. The shock of anger at frightful tales from Belgium⁠—little children with their hands cut off (no evidence for that one); women foully outraged; civilians shot in cold blood⁠—sent many men at a quick pace to the recruiting agents. Others were sent there by the taunt of a girl, or the sneer of a comrade in khaki, or the straight, steady look in the eyes of a father who said, “What about it, Dick?⁠ ⁠… The old country is up against it.” It was that last thought which worked in the brain of England’s manhood. That was his real call, which whispered to men at the plow⁠—quiet, ruminating lads, the peasant type, the yeoman⁠—and excited undergraduates in their rooms at Oxford and Cambridge, and the masters of public schools, and all manner of young men, and some, as I know, old in years but young in heart. “The old country is in danger!” The shadow of a menace was creeping over some little patch of England⁠—or of Scotland. + 

“I’s best be going,” said the village boy. + 

“ ‘Dulce et decorum est⁠—’ ” said the undergraduate. + 

“I hate the idea, but it’s got to be done,” said the city-bred man. + 

So they disappeared from their familiar haunts⁠—more and more of them as the months passed. They were put into training-camps, “pigged” it on dirty straw in dirty barns, were ill-fed and ill-equipped, and trained by hard-mouthed sergeants⁠—tyrants and bullies in a good cause⁠—until they became automata at the word of command, lost their souls, as it seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training, and cursed their fate. Only comradeship helped them⁠—not always jolly, if they happened to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven months’ training! Were they ever going to the front? The war would be over before they landed in France⁠ ⁠… Then, at last, they came. + 

III + 

It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them, but who could not get a word of their doings in France. + 

I saw the first of the “Kitchener men,” as we called them then. The tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching forward to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the imagination of our people will strive to conjure up the vision of those boys who, in the year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as conscript soldiers, but as volunteers, for the old country’s sake, to take their risks and “do their bit” in the world’s bloodiest war. I saw those fellows day by day, touched hands with them, went into the trenches with them, heard their first tales, and strolled into their billets when they had shaken down for a night or two within sound of the guns. History will envy me that, this living touch with the men who, beyond any doubt, did in their simple way act and suffer things before the war ended which revealed new wonders of human courage and endurance. Some people envied me then⁠—those people at home to whom those boys belonged, and who in country towns and villages and suburban houses would have given their hearts to get one look at them there in Flanders and to see the way of their life⁠ ⁠… How were they living? How did they like it? How were they sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New Army? + 

“Oh, a very cheerful lot,” said a sergeant-major of the old Regular type, who was having a quiet pipe over a halfpenny paper in a shed at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentières, which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.) + 

“Not a bit of trouble with them,” said the sergeant-major, “and all as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, ‘I’m going.’ They’re glad to be out. Over-trained, some of ’em. For ten months we’ve been working ’em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing enough. Now you couldn’t find a better battalion, though some more famous⁠ ⁠… Till we get our chance, you know.” + 

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn, where a party of his men were resting. + 

“You’ll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I’ll bet on that.” + 

The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think of hayfields in southern England. + 

They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, “Anyone here from Burpham?” + 

One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair, and said, “Yes.” + 

I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes. + 

“P’raps I’ve seed the last o’ Burpham,” he said in a kind of whisper, so that the other men should not hear. + 

The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages. They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair, freckled, sunbaked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in France. Anything was better than training at home. + 

“I like Germans more’n sergeant-majors,” said one young yokel, and the others shouted with laughter at his jest. + 

“Perhaps you haven’t met the German sergeants,” I said. + 

“I’ve met our’n,” said the Sussex boy. “A man’s a fool to be a soldier. Eh, lads?” + 

They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers. + 

“Not that we’re skeered,” said one of them. “We’ll be glad when the fighting begins.” + 

“Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don’t forget the shells last night.” + 

There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their real thoughts⁠—their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought of death⁠—very close to them now⁠—and their sense of strangeness in this scene on the edge of Armentières, a world away from their old life. + 

The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with a grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his smile. + 

“These boys of mine are all right,” he said. “They’re dear fellows, and ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but my N.C.O.’s are a first-class lot, and we’re ready for business.” + 

He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages of the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and cottages for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had picked the lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came from a good stock⁠—the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better stuff. The officers were men of old county families, and they knew their men. That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with regard to casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company commander, a fine fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson, should have been picked off by a sniper on his first day out. + 

The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging to do in the open. + 

“Quiet there, boys,” said the sergeant-major. “And no larks.” + 

It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy’s trenches were about a thousand yards away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap. + 

“And my old mother thinks I’m enjoying myself!” said the heir to a seaside lodging-house. + 

“Thirsty work, this grave-digging job,” said a lad who used to skate on rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade. + 

“Can’t see much in those shells,” said a young man who once sold ladies’ blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. “How those newspaper chaps do try to frighten us!” + 

He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk. + 

“What’s that? Wasps?” + 

A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a beast. + 

“What’s that, Sergeant?” + 

“Machine-guns, my child. Keep your head down, or you’ll lose hold of it⁠ ⁠… Steady, there. Don’t get jumpy, now!” + 

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way. + 

“Get up, Charlie,” said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared voice, “Oh, Sergeant!” + 

“That’s all right,” said the sergeant-major. “We’re getting off very lightly. New remember what I’ve been telling you⁠ ⁠… Stretcher this way.” + 

They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New Army. + 

“Like old soldiers, sir,” said the sergeant-major, when he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast. + 

It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all⁠—which made the Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy’s guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one’s first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of redbrick walls. + 

“Funny business!” said one of the boys. + 

“Regular Drury Lane melodrama,” said another. + 

“Looks as if some of us wouldn’t be home in time for lunch,” was another comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line. + 

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when this beastliness is being done. + 

“Not a single casualty,” said one of the officers when the storm of shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks. “Anything wrong with our luck?” + 

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone. No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets, where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march. + 

“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I’m a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. ‘Perhaps you’ll be down for breakfast now,’ she said. But a shell is better⁠—as a knocker-up. I didn’t stop to dress.” + 

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of his escape. + 

“K.’s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive men. + 

“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above the churchyard wall. + 

“Oh, we’ll do all right in the open air, all along of the German trenches,” was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned at their own wit. + 

IV + 

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left them stone-cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood) like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G.H.Q. “What’s patriotism?” asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws. The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees, the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought. + 

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother’s plants⁠ ⁠… London! Good old London!⁠ ⁠… His heart ached for it sometimes when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No Man’s Land. + 

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the building, and listened. The men were singing “Auld Lang Syne” to the accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts, and the old tune⁠—so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the war zone⁠—sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang “God Save the King.” I heard it sung a thousand times or more on royal festivals and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders, where a number of “K.’s men” lay on the straw a night or two away from the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen outside that barn and hear those words: + 

Send him victorious, + 

Happy and glorious. + 

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a mother and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London, where the buses went clanging down the Strand. + 

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.’s men, standing sentry outside the camp. + 

“Who goes there?” + 

It was a cockney voice. + 

“Friends.” + 

“Pass, friends. All’s well.” + 

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hellfires and killed in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said, like a voice of Fate, “All’s well.” + 

V + 

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not “answer back.” In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We called this monster “grandma,” and there was a little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first shell. Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals and by God. Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches⁠—their formidable earthworks with deep, shellproof dugouts⁠—like the glitter of confetti, and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the enemy’s line and were mown down by machine-gun fire⁠—the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak⁠—in the usual way of those early days. The first shell fired by our monster howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed at it and tore it to tatters. + 

“Some shell!” said an officer. “Now we ought to win the war⁠—I don’t think!” + 

Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)⁠—“aunty,” as we called it. + 

Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually our gun-power grew and grew, until we could “answer back,” and give more than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket, as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire, having their trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their bodies broken, at all times and in all places within range of German guns. + 

Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were visible. From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and Messines they could see for miles across our territory, not only the trenches, but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them and the roads through the villages. They looked straight into Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of white dust which would tell them when men were marching by⁠—more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with shells to spare ranged upon separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail against their 5.9’s, which in those early days we could only answer by a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres. + 

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places, searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls. They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, “It’s quite cozy, after all!” + 

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James’s Street clubs, in the same tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor⁠—while they listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be today or tomorrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear them to bits and make a mess of things. + 

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses of Hagenbeck’s Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk⁠—silk pajamas⁠—and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit another gold-tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast. His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals, done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive within a few yards of his master⁠ ⁠… Whenever I went to the canal-bank, and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank and dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were “game” until some bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to tatters. + 

VI + 

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places. The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage. + 

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in ’15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette. + 

We were sitting in the garden of the general’s headquarters, having a picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps, which attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war. No shell came crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well within range of the enemy’s guns), and the loudest noise was the drop of an overripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle signaled a hostile airplane overhead, but it passed without throwing a bomb. + 

“You will have a moist time in some of the trenches,” said the general (whose boots were finely polished). “The rain has made them rather damp⁠ ⁠… But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We’re expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It’s an interesting place.” + 

The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under me. It makes such a mess of a man. + 

A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: “The sound of picks has been heard close to our saphead. The enemy will probably explode their mine in a few hours.” + 

“That’s the place I was telling you about,” said the general. “It’s well worth a visit⁠ ⁠… But you must make up your mind to get your feet wet.” + 

As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders, I was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man. + 

It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that in London⁠—which seemed a long way off⁠—people were going about under umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers, who cursed the rain⁠—as in the old days, “they swore terribly in Flanders”⁠—did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took off their trousers. + 

There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise⁠—“like a German drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me. + 

“Why grouse?” he said, presently. “It’s better than Brighton!” + 

It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long communication trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court maze toward the front line, and the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by a place called the “Tambour.” Shells came whining overhead and somewhere behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky, with metallic bangs, as though opening and shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rifle-shots showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil. + 

It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a sideslip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his elegant legs. + 

“Clever fellows!” said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-hole, and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for at least ten paces. The officer’s laughter was loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of despond. + 

“And I hope they can swim!” said an ironical voice from a dugout, as the officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square burrows, the men who had been working all night under their platoon commanders, and were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwellings. As I paddled on I glanced at those men lying on straw which gave out a moist smell, mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not interested in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose of “hate” to the village of Bécourt-Bécordel. The noise did not interrupt their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of those who were awake were reading novelettes, forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance. Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up, staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in daydreams of some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them, and said, “How are you getting on?” He answered, “I’m not getting on⁠ ⁠… I don’t see the fun of this.” + 

“Can you keep dry?” + 

“Dry?⁠ ⁠… I’m soaked to the skin.” + 

“What’s it like here?” + 

“It’s hell⁠ ⁠… The devils blow up mines to make things worse.” + 

Another boy spoke. + 

“Don’t you mind what he says, sir. He’s always a gloomy bastard. Doesn’t believe in his luck.” + 

There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts⁠—a woman’s face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers. + 

A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by a soldier-priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I read the words Notre Dame des Tranchées (“Our Lady of the Trenches”). A tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those who worshiped here: + 

This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not touch the fragile statue in trench-clay. + 

“Our Lady of the Trenches!” It was the first time I had heard of this new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do. + 

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier was playing the mandolin to two comrades. “All the latest ragtime,” said one of them with a grin. + 

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming frogs. Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them. + 

“Rats are the worst plague,” said a colonel, coming out of the battalion headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table. “There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they’re audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes with them⁠ ⁠… I don’t mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally with me.” + 

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the enemy’s that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in the churned-up soil⁠ ⁠… The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of death in his eyes. + 

One of the officers had spoken to me privately. + 

“I’m afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it’s the mining business that wears one’s nerve to shreds. One never knows.” + 

I hated to leave him there to his agony⁠ ⁠… The colonel himself was all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shellfire and the mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver ricocheted from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for having fired. + 

The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the waterlogged trenches, the shellfire which broke down the parapets and buried men in wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers waiting for English heads, and then the mines⁠—oh, a cheery little school of courage for the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war for the devil and General Squeers! + 

VII + 

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields beyond or to fall within its ramparts. + 

I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I saw it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans first used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and British soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that first visit I found it scarred by shellfire, and its great Cloth Hall was roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with customers in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths served by the women and girls who sold picture postcards and Flemish lace and fancy cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of what might happen here in this city, so close to the enemy’s lines, so close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop, crowded with young officers, who were served by two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the English money they were making. + 

A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English, Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the Lille and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell upon them. They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into unconsciousness, and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling desperately against some stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and then gasped and lurched as they ran and fell. It was after that when shells came in hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them on fire, until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds of civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried there. Others crawled into a big drainpipe⁠—there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them⁠—and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their buttresses and towers. + 

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled. + 

The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Château⁠ ⁠… For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death; and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, taking up a new day’s rations from the railheads, raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish carthorses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as I write⁠—that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year after year. + 

That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely quiet, I remember. There was “nothing doing,” as our men used to say. The German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war under every old hedge. + 

“What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?” asked one of my companions. There were three of us. + 

It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then⁠—they were early days!⁠—looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs. + 

Suddenly one of us said, “Good God!” + 

An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which came up from its center as though its marketplace had opened up and vomited out infernal vapors. + 

“A big shell that!” said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who later in the war was sniper-in-chief of the British army. Something enraged him at the sight of that shelled village. + 

“Damn them!” he said. “Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up life!” + 

Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a minute or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the way to Ypres. The German gunners had wakened up again. They always did. They were getting busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the ditch, we ate the luncheon we had carried in our pockets. + 

“A silly idea!” said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his eyes. He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and all the boys he knew were being killed. + 

“What’s silly?” I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was thinking of, in a world of folly. + 

“Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one’s mouth, just because some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal acquaintance.” + 

“Damn silly,” I said. + 

“That’s all there is to it in modern warfare,” said the lanky man. “It’s not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against your enemy’s, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when guns kill at fifteen miles?” + 

Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him show his head, and shot each head that showed. + 

The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again. It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past the redbrick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls, past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring, as our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres. The enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in the morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again⁠ ⁠… I remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken traces of peoples who once had lived here in security. I looked up at the blue sky above those white ruins, and had an idea that death hovered there like a hawk ready to pounce. Even as one of us (not I) spoke the thought, the signal came. It was a humming drone high up in the sky. + 

“Look out!” said the lanky man. “Germans!” + 

It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande Place were hostile things, because suddenly white puffballs burst all round them, as the shrapnel of our own guns scattered about them. But they flew round steadily in a half-circle until they were poised above our heads. + 

It was time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just there, where masses of stonework were piled high. At any moment things might drop. I ducked my head behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill “coo-ee!” from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup was flung against a bit of wall close to where the lanky man sat in a shell-hole. He picked it up and said, “Queer!” and then smelled it, and said “Queer!” again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poisonous liquid from a German chemist’s shop. Other bombs were dropping round as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched still by the following shell-bursts. Then they passed toward their own lines, and my friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, “Let’s be going.” + 

It was time to go. + 

When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field nearby to watch the bombardment. The air moved with the rushing waves which tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over Ypres came the high singsong of the enemies’ answering voice. + 

As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vlamertinghe, a movement of transport wagons and marching men. They were going up in the darkness through Ypres⁠—rations and reliefs. They were the New Army men of the West Riding. + 

“Carry on there,” said a young officer at the head of his company. Something in his eyes startled me. Was it fear, or an act of sacrifice? I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were killed most nights on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and sometimes many. One shell killed thirty one night, and their bodies lay strewn, headless and limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped their way through, between bursts of shellfire, hoping to dodge them, and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter of their wheels and shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and the raw flesh of the dead horses that had not dodged them. Many men were buried alive in Ypres, under masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, and were wakened by the avalanche above them. Comrades tried to dig them out, to pull away great stones, to get down to those vaults below from which voices were calling; and while they worked other shells came and laid dead bodies above the stones which had entombed their living comrades. That happened, not once or twice, but many times in Ypres. + 

There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had had eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very long at a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic according to the shellfire. He kept a visitors’ book as a hobby, until it was buried under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the menace of death always about him. + 

VIII + 

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea. + 

“It would be a great adventure,” he said, as we stood listening to the gunfire over there. + 

“It would be damn silly,” said a staff officer. “Only a stern sense of duty would make me do it.” + 

It was Gullett who was the brave man. + 

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living soul. + 

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been once a fair city. + 

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of the sinking sun and the first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us. + 

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so that the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and the great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth Hall was but a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark’s was a stark ruin, which gleamed white through the darkening twilight. + 

We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried life. + 

It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron lampposts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and plants still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed by the daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been all wrecked. + 

The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms, and in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we stumbled over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped sideways with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the signal for our batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through the night, with that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast. + 

The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses or of huge blocks of stone splitting into fragments. + 

We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first flares of the night were being lighted by both sides above their trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white glare which faded away tremulously after half a minute. + 

Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields between Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance. The whole shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We stared across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge crater, and those trenches which were battered to pieces but not abandoned in the first battle of Ypres and the second battle. + 

That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British soldiers⁠—there were years to follow when many more would lie there⁠—and as between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on this ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our loneliness here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and made me see unnatural things. + 

No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures approaching him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like pistol-shots. + 

“Halt! Who goes there?” + 

“Friends!” we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet. + 

“Come close to be recognized!” he said, and his voice was harsh. + 

We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot too soon. + 

“Who are you?” he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained he laughed gruffly. “I never saw two strangers pass this way before!” + 

He was an old soldier, “back to the army again,” with Kitchener’s men. He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa⁠—“Little wars compared to this,” as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a bricklayer’s laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more “luminous” than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness, except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion at Hooge, who were hard pressed. “They went along under a lot of shrapnel and had many casualties.” + 

He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with phrases of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul of the man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private soldier, was revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, “But the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!” + 

We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground unplowed by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to finding a safe spot for a bivouac. + 

There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say “No shells will fall here.” But one place we found where there seemed some reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be “crumped” before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there, but, peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the idea of lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there was a foul look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to rot there. They were inhabited already by half-wild cats⁠—the abandoned cats of Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their old houses⁠—and they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match into their lairs. + 

There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all the problems of life and death and the meaning of man’s heritage. + 

Another sentry challenged us⁠—all his nerves jangled at our apparition. He was a young fellow, one of “Kitchener’s crowd,” and told us frankly that he had the “jimjams” in this solitude of Ypres and “saw Germans” every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us⁠—“for company.” + 

It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes damp. Cake and sweet liquor were poor provisions for the night, and the thought of hot tea was infinitely seductive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few soldiers round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our way along, holding our breath at times as a shell came sweeping overhead or burst with a sputter of steel against the ramparts. It was profoundly dark, so that only the glowworms glittered like jewels on black velvet. The moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of the distant flares only glimmered faintly above the broken walls. In a tunnel of darkness voices were speaking and someone was whistling softly, and a gleam of red light made a bar across the grass. We walked toward a group of black figures, suddenly silent at our approach⁠—obviously startled. + 

“Who’s there?” said a voice. + 

We were just in time for tea⁠—a stroke of luck⁠—with a company of boys (all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the night here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense of humor, cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there was a yearning for the end of a business which was too close to death. + 

I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised for my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole business. + 

“I should like to cancel my contract,” he remarked. + 

“Yes, send in your resignation, old lad,” said another, with ironical laughter. + 

“They’d consider it, wouldn’t they? P’raps offer a rise in wages⁠—I don’t think!” + 

Another boy said, “I am a citizen of no mean Empire, but what the hell is the Empire going to do for me when the next shell blows off both my bleeding legs?” + 

This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins of the Cloth Hall. + 

“Soldiers are prisoners,” said a boy without any trace of humor. “You’re lagged, and you can’t escape. A ‘blighty’ is the best luck you can hope for.” + 

“I don’t want to kill Germans,” said a fellow with a superior accent. “I’ve no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don’t like butcher’s work.” + 

“Christian service, that’s what the padre calls it. I wonder if Christ would have stuck a bayonet into a German stomach⁠—a German with his hands up. That’s what we’re asked to do.” + 

“Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why mention it? This is war, and we’re back to the primitive state⁠—BC. All the same, I say my little prayers when I’m in a blue funk. + 

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, + 

Look upon a little child.” + 

This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, received with much hilarity, not too loud, for fear of drawing fire⁠—though really no Germans could have heard any laughter in Ypres. + 

Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We called on him, and found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad, with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his loneliness, with a roof over his head which would be no proof against a fair-sized shell. + 

He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him. He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his green armchair. + 

The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a little while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as the first faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new spasms of ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an attack of the nerves, as always at that hour. + 

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated fireworks after a night of orgy. + 

In a distant field a cock crew. + 

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went two tired figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to escape the early morning “hate” which was sure to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour of six. + 

I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about, and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital of the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about. + 

“Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert.” + 

So said the traffic man at the crossroads. + 

As one strapped on one’s steel helmet and shortened the strap of one’s gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one’s soul icily. + 

IX + 

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil’s playground and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time there was a château there called the White Château, with excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up their conference. Afterward there was no château, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sandbags and burrowed in the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mineshaft. + 

I remember one young Irish officer who came down to our quarters on a brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile. + 

“Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?” he asked. + 

He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a strong, fetid smell came from him. + 

“Hooge,” he said, in a thoughtful way, “is not a health resort.” + 

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper. He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge, and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he went back again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before saying goodbye he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a moment or two listened to birds twittering in the trees. + 

“Thanks very much,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed this visit a good deal⁠ ⁠… Goodbye.” + 

He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, and the mine-crater where his Irish soldiers were lying in slime, in which vermin crawled. + 

Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our position, blowing a few men to bits and scattering the sandbags. Sometimes it was our men who upheaved the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the new crater. + 

It was in July of ’15 that the devils of Hooge became merry and bright with increased activity. The Germans had taken possession of one of the mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road, with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was like the spearhead of their position. They had fortified it with sandbags and crammed it with machine-guns which could sweep the ground on three sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise. Our trenches immediately faced this stronghold from the other side of a road at right angles with the Menin road, and our men⁠—the New Army boys⁠—were shelled day and night, so that many of them were torn to pieces, and others buried alive, and others sent mad by shell-shock. (They were learning their lessons in the school of courage.) It was decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, to clear out this hornets’ nest, and the job was given to the sappers, who mined under the roadway toward the redoubt, while our heavy artillery shelled the enemy’s position all around the neighborhood. + 

On July 22nd the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low, horribly afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by a gust of flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon them. + 

“I thought I had been blown to bits,” one of them told me. “I was a quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, ‘Christ!⁠ ⁠… Christ!’ ” + 

When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the enemy’s redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had been a crisscross of trenches and sandbag shelters for their machine-guns and a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps which had blocked up the enemy’s trenches on either side of the position, so that they could not rush into the cavern and take possession. It was our men who “rushed” the crater and lay there panting in its smoking soil. + 

Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt, and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the mine-explosion and by the loss of their spearhead, the Germans kept up a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of gunfire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and wounded many men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the King’s Royal Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning of their positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was the shell screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into pulp like those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks. + 

On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after a heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K.R.R. raised their heads above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about. There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were wailing. The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some moisture falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid. + 

“What in hell’s name⁠—?” said a subaltern. + 

One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin. + 

Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hosepipes. Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground where the King’s Royal Rifles lay. + 

Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making them living torches, and in a second or two cinders. + 

It was a new horror of war⁠—the Flammenwerfer. + 

Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay. + 

The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved up at once to support their comrades and make a counterattack. The ground they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many fell, but the others attacked again and again, regardless of their losses, and won back part of the lost ground, leaving only a depth of five hundred yards in the enemy’s hands. + 

So the position remained until the morning of August 9th, when a new attack was begun by the Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Midland troops of the 6th Division, who had been long in the salient and had proved the quality of northern “grit” in the foul places and the foul weather of that region. + 

It was late on the night of August 8th that these battalions took up their position, ready for the assault. These men, who came mostly from mines and workshops, were hard and steady and did not show any outward sign of nervousness, though they knew well enough that before the light of another day came their numbers would have passed through the lottery of this game of death. Each man’s life depended on no more than a fluke of luck by the throw of those dice which explode as they fall. They knew what their job was. It was to cross five hundred yards of open ground to capture and to hold a certain part of the German position near the Château of Hooge. + 

They were at the apex of the triangle which made a German salient after the ground was lost, on July 30th. On the left side of the triangle was Zouave Wood, and Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to a strong fort held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and every kind of bomb. The base of the upturned triangle was made by the Menin road, to the north, beyond which lay the crater, the château, and the stables. + 

The way that lay between the regiment and their goal was not an easy one to pass. It was cut and crosscut by our old trenches, now held by the enemy, who had made tangles of barbed wire in front of their parapets, and had placed machine-guns at various points. The ground was littered with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 30th, and pockmarked by deep shell-holes. To cross five hundred yards of such ground in the storm of the enemy’s fire would be an ordeal greater than that of rushing from one trench to another. It would have to be done in regular attack formation, and with the best of luck would be a grim and costly progress. + 

The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could only see one another as shadows blacker than the night. They were very quiet; each man was fighting down his fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves hideously strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, “Steady, lads,” were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants and sergeants. The sounds of men whispering, a cough here and there, a word of command, the clink of bayonets, the cracking of twigs under heavy boots, the shuffle of troops getting into line, would not carry with any loudness to German ears. + 

The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the preliminary bombardment which would smash a way for them. The officers struck matches now and then to glance at their wristwatches, set very carefully to those of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with an enormous violence of shellfire, so that the night was shattered with the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber mingled their explosions, and the long screech of the shells rushed through the air as though thousands of engines were chasing one another madly through a vast junction in that black vault. + 

The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns lengthened their fuses the infantry advance would begin. Their nerves were getting jangled. It was just the torture of human animals. There was an indrawing of breath when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets, sending up flares which made white waves of light. If they were seen! There would be a shambles. + 

But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a thick veil, hiding those mining lads who stared toward the illuminations above the black vapors and at the flashes which seemed to stab great rents in the pall of smoke. “It was a jumpy moment,” said the colonel of the Durhams, and the moment lengthened into minutes. + 

Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had been given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the guns lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Château of Hooge, beyond the Menin road, six hundred yards away. + 

“Time!” + 

The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men girdled with hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and made their first rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our shells, and the trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn with broken wire and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel. + 

It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched. + 

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a slaughterhouse. + 

The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now, and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again, until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of hell. + 

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit of their line of assault and achieved the task which had been set them. They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw red through bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey⁠—these decent Yorkshire lads. + 

Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted, until not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on that 9th of August revealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent for words to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had been a panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that dreadful screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of steel at their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham and Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few who do must have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it haunts them. + 

The assaulting battalion had lost many men during the assault, but their main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns belched out a large quantity of heavy shells from the direction of Hill 60. They raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the position they had gained. But they would not go back or crawl away from their dead. + 

All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our battery positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies through the “crumped” trenches, the men held on and consolidated their positions. One of the most astounding feats was done by the sappers, who put up barbed wire beyond the line under a devilish cannonade. + 

A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed by a shell early in the action, and worked his way back to get another. He succeeded in reaching the advanced line again, but another shell knocked out his second instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch with the battalion headquarters by means of messengers, and again and again officers and men made their way across the zone of fire or died in the attempt. Messages reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his front trenches had been blown away. + 

From other parts of the line reports came in that the enemy was preparing a counterattack. For several hours now the colonel of the Durhams could not get into touch with his companies, isolated and hidden beneath the smoke of the shell-bursts. Flag-wagging and heliographing were out of the question. He could not tell even if a single man remained alive out there beneath all those shells. No word came from them now to let him know if the enemy were counterattacking. + 

Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make his own reconnaissance. The bombardment was still relentless, and it was only possible to go part of the way in an old communication trench. The ground about was littered with the dead, still being blown about by high explosives. + 

The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt and with the knowledge that most of the dead here were his own. When he told me this adventure his only comment was the soldier’s phrase, “It was not what might be called a ‘healthy’ place.” He could see no sign of a counterattack, but, straining through the smoke-clouds, his eyes could detect no sign of life where his men had been holding the captured lines. Were they all dead out there? + 

On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back with the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road. + 

In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them had been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding shells and had been buried in the scatter of earth. + 

“When at last my men came back⁠—those of them who had received the order,” said the colonel, “I knew the price of their achievement⁠—its cost in officers and men.” He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody sacrifice. + 

There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of them were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through the next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of water and suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield. + 

There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had had his jaw broken by a piece of shell, but still led his men. Later in the day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his command, and he was still leading the survivors of his company when he came back on the morning of Tuesday, August 10th. + 

Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, “Send us more bombs.” It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under shellfire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death. + 

So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their hell, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague. + 

X + 

Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy’s slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets. + 

A friend of mine⁠—an ironical fellow⁠—nudged me, and said, “Sunday-school for young Christians!” and made a hideous face, very comical. + 

It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and “O.C. Bayonets”⁠—Col. Ronald Campbell⁠—was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier-boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the sack. + 

“That’s what I like to see,” said an officer. “There’s a fine fighting-spirit in that lad. He’ll kill plenty of Germans before he’s done.” + 

Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes bulge out of their heads, fired them with bloodlust, stoked up hatred of Germans⁠—all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories⁠—one, famous in the army, called “Where’s ’Arry?” + 

It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, “Where’s ’Arry?⁠ ⁠… ’Arry ’asn’t ’ad a go yet.” + 

’Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher’s work, but he was called up and given his man to kill. And after that ’Arry was like a man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood. + 

He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. “You may meet a German who says, ‘Mercy! I have ten children.’⁠ ⁠… Kill him! He might have ten more.” + 

At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of death⁠—machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on, tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived longest were experts in divers branches of technical education. + 

Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets⁠—the gamecocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading up to elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He challenged the whole army system of discipline imposed by authority by a new system of self-discipline based upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes. + 

“It’s a pity,” he said, “they have to go off again and be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed⁠—but that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of war.” + 

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered “Willie Woodbine,” the fighting parson and soldier’s poet, who was the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two. They fought one another with science (as old professionals) and challenged any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war, and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches again. + 

XI + 

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and château was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another. + 

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a bastard; or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant. + 

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his officers’ mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, “Où est le blooming couteau?” or “Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s’il vous plaît, madame.” It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that “Les pommes de terre frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses cheveux on.” In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have passed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up the water from old wells, and whistled “I Know a Lassie” to the girl who brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy played a “wee bit” on the pipes to the peasant-folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old lady who had given him her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with his undeveloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations were embarrassing. + 

It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive earthmen, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with buttercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns. + 

There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our officers were billeted in French châteaux. There was a splendor of surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and went through gilded gates emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days of the Sun King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of harvests had been stored. From one of the archways here one might see in the mind’s eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, or even Henri de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes alight in the sun as they mounted their horses for a morning’s boar-hunt. + 

It was surprising at first when a young British officer came out and said, “Toppin’ morning,” or, “Any news from the Dardanelles?” There was something incongruous about this habitation of French châteaux by British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me laugh in early days of first impressions, when I went through the rooms of one of those old historic houses, well within range of the German guns with a brigade major. It was the Château de Henencourt, near Albert. + 

“This is the general’s bedroom,” said the brigade major, opening a door which led off a gallery, in which many beautiful women of France and many great nobles of the old regime looked down from their gilt frames. + 

The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed Mme. du Barry might have stretched her arms and yawned, or the beautiful Duchesse de Mazarin might have held her morning levee. A British general, with his bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little strange under that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs dancing overhead on the flowered ceiling. His top-boots and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze toilet-table. His leather belts and field-glasses lay on the polished boards beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and Diana went a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly rose-tinted or darkly paneled other officers had made a litter of their bags, haversacks, rubber baths, trench-boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down to dinner in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France, in silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down upon their khaki. The owner of the château, in whose veins flowed the blood of those old aristocrats, was away with his regiment, in which he held the rank of corporal. His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the estate, from which all the menservants except the veterans had been mobilized. In her own château she kept one room for herself, and every morning came in from the dairies, where she had been working with her maids, to say, with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her house: “Bon jour, messieurs! Ça va bien?” + 

She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor châteaux of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride. + 

Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and twisted iron. + 

I saw the ruins of the Château de Henencourt two years after my first visit there. The enemy’s line had come closer to it and it was a target for their guns. Our guns⁠—heavy and light⁠—were firing from the back yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had already broken the roofs and turrets of the château and torn away great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the petit salon. His hand trembled as he greeted me. + 

“I’m not fond of this place,” he said. “The whole damn thing will come down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars.” + 

We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the vault. A shell came over the château and burst in the outhouses. + 

“They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago,” said the colonel. “Made a mess of some heavy gunners.” + 

There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so sinister a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole directing his battery⁠ ⁠… The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads. + 

XII + 

One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of ’15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth⁠—and the queerest part of it all was the sense of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one’s movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole place could be blown off the face of the earth⁠ ⁠… but for the convenient fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own guns. + 

That sounded like a fairytale to men who, in other places, could not go over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their heads up for a single second, without risking instant death. + 

I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the British infantry surrounding them⁠—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood⁠—the lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the top of the hill. + 

He made a slight detour to point out a German shell which had fallen there without exploding, and made laughing comments upon the harmless, futile character of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their best to kill us, but oh, so feebly! + 

Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called out, sharply, “Ne touchez pas!” I would rather have touched a sleeping tiger than that conical piece of metal with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low to see the inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with more recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled upon it between the men’s initials. + 

Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our trenches, and, standing there, looked down upon the villages of Vaux and Curlu, separated by a piece of marshy water. In the farthest village were the Germans, and in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our own men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway across the marsh and a strip of woods half a rifle-shot in length. + 

Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village and ours, were the German trenches and the German guns. I looked into the streets of both villages as clearly as one may see into Clovelly village from the crest of the hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were strolling about. One was sitting on the windowsill of a cottage, kicking up his heels. + 

In the German village of Curlu the roadways were concealed by the perspective of the houses, with their gables and chimney-stacks, so that I could not see any passersby. But at the top of the road, going out of the village and standing outside the last house on the road, was a solitary figure⁠—a German sentry. + 

The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away from the village on the hillside. + 

“Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist their flag for victories. It wagged a good deal during the recent Russian fighting. But lately they have not had the cheek to put it up.” + 

This interpreter⁠—the Baron de Rosen⁠—laughed very heartily at that naked pole on the hill. + 

Then I left him and joined our own men, and went down a steep hill into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as an outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into rubbish heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the reeds around. + 

And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and while the guns were silent except for long-range fire, an old-fashioned mode of war⁠—what the adjutant of this little outpost called a “gentlemanly warfare,” prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one side against somewhat the same number on the other. + 

Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh⁠—a pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that a little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the thicket which screened the German village of Curlu. + 

It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in parti-colored clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly contact was made. + 

Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility. It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German helmets and other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in the village, and a good night’s rest, as when English knights fought the French, not far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war correspondent, Sir John Froissart. + 

All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood, where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood, motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If I had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I should have walked into the German village. But, on the other hand, I should not have walked back again.⁠ ⁠… + 

When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two of massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the marsh men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible powers which belched forth death. + 

It was part of the French system of “keeping quiet” until the turn of big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far. At Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a little too far, with relaxed vigilance. + 

It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries. + 

“Souvenir!” said one of them one day. “Bullet⁠—you know⁠—cartouche. Comprenny?” + 

A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a grin and said, “Mais oui, mon vieux,” and felt in his pouch for a cartridge, and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between his knees. + 

“Fini!” he said. “Tout fini, mon p’tit camarade.” + 

The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the loop of the Somme, and “pinched” every man of the French garrison. There was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees. + 

Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war, when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map. + 

XIII + 

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentières⁠—a most “unhealthy” place in later years of war⁠—a bathing establishment was organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they had brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they had done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility of their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt of Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum⁠—an object-lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. It was not a saint’s shirt, but had been worn by a British officer in the trenches, and was like tens of thousands of other shirts worn by our officers and men in the first winters of the war, neither better nor worse, but a fair average specimen. It had been framed in a glass case, and revealed, on its linen, the corpses of thousands of lice. That vermin swarmed upon the bodies of all our boys who went into the trenches and tortured them. After three days they were lousy from head to foot. After three weeks they were walking menageries. To English boys from clean homes, to young officers who had been brought up in the religion of the morning tub, this was one of the worst horrors of war. They were disgusted with themselves. Their own bodies were revolting to them. Scores of times I have seen battalions of men just out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the foul beast. They had a technical name for this hunter’s job. They called it “chatting.” They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the water-brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which battalions of men could wash their bodies. + 

The place in Nieppe had been a jute-factory, and there were big tubs in the sheds, and nearby was the water of the Lys. Boilers were set going to heat the water. A battalion’s shirts were put into an oven and the lice were baked and killed. It was a splendid thing to see scores of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like children. They splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put their heads under water and came up puffing and blowing like grampuses. Something broke in one’s heart to see them, those splendid boys whose bodies might soon be torn to tatters by chunks of steel. One of them remembered a bit of Latin he had sung at Stonyhurst: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.” (“Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.”) + 

On the other side of the lines the Germans were suffering in the same way, lousy also, and they, too, were organizing bathhouses. After their first retreat I saw a queer name on a wooden shed: Entlausunganstalt. I puzzled over it a moment, and then understood. It was a new word created out of the dirt of modern war⁠—“Delousing station.” + 

XIV + 

It was harvest-time in the summer of ’15, and Death was not the only reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far ridge, and left the world in darkness. + 

On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as charcoal on the edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame against the silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The burning colors died out in a few minutes, and the fields darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled until they became quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest moon. Another night had come in this year of war. + 

Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular intervals the earth trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, thunderous shocks. + 

“The moon’s face looks full of irony tonight,” said the man by my side. “It seems to say, ‘What fools those creatures are down there, spoiling their harvest-time with such a mess of blood!’ ” + 

The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish nights. I saw the Milky Way clearly tracked across the dark desert. The Pleiades and Orion’s belt were like diamonds on black velvet. But among all these worlds of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared and disappeared. On the road back from a French town one night I looked Arras way, and saw what seemed a bursting planet. It fell with a scatter of burning pieces. Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night was rent with stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking it, and a moment later a finger of white fire was traced along the black edge of the far-off woods, so that the whole sky was brightened for a moment and then was blotted out by a deeper darkness⁠ ⁠… Arras was being shelled again, as I saw it many times in those long years of war. + 

The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible. Their strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made them dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One night, as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend. Every house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came through any crack. No footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost palpable. It seemed to press against one’s eyeballs like a velvet mask. My nerves were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence and invisibility that I started violently at the sound of a quiet voice speaking three inches from my ear. + 

“Halte! Qui va là?” + 

It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by a glint. + 

Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met the sky. + 

I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew the reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for miles each way. Those were the parapets of German trenches, and in the ditches below them were earthmen, armed with deadly weapons, staring out across the beauty of France and wondering, perhaps, why they should be there to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in their range of vision, with an idle thought as to whether it were worth their while to let a bullet loose and end my walk. They could have done so easily, but did not bother. No shot or shell came to break through the hum of bees or to crash through the sigh of the wind, which was bending all the ears of corn to listen to the murmurous insect-life in these fields of France. + 

Close to me was a group of peasants⁠—a study for a painter like Millet. One of them shouted out to me, “Voilà les Boches!” waving his arm to left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them. + 

A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice munched an apple, like Audrey in As You Like It, and between her bites told me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that she had been nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to great holes in the field), and described the coming of the Germans into her village over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of French soldiers and had given one of those fat Germans a blow on the face when he had tried to make love to her in her father’s barn. Her mother had been raped. + 

In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of them was driving the reaping-machine and looked like a gunner on his limber, with his képi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of a leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a handcart. It was a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those harvesters in uniform. + 

The same thought was in the mind of a British officer. + 

“A beautiful country, this,” he said. “It’s a pity to cut it up with trenches and barbed wire.” + 

Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men’s souls, not shirking the next ordeal. + 

It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of ’15, that one found one’s way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of the year’s harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of our batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn howls of murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning, with bent backs. + 

In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel, but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in the heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many of our soldiers learned the A.B.C. of actual warfare after their training in camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not allowed in the dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the intervals between potshots at German periscopes. + 

The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were being cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men was hit by a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went toward the first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not fall across a German periscope. The sight of that dead body passing chilled one a little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors⁠—eighteen under one mound⁠—but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay where the gleaners could not reach them. + 

I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man’s Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel bullets and a litter of limbs. + 

XV + 

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entertainment among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged “variety” shows, organized by young officers who had been amateur actors before the war, who searched around for likely talent. There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional “funny men,” trick cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the summer of ’15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments: “The Follies,” “The Bow Bells,” “The Jocks,” “The Pip-Squeaks,” “The Whizzbangs,” “The Diamonds,” “The Brass Hats,” “The Verey Lights,” and many others with fancy names. + 

I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux, a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-factory, and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with seven or eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken, barn-like building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the darkness, and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled. + 

There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one’s nostrils, and when the curtain went up on a well-fitted stage and “The Follies” began their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter. What mattered was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the piano, and the outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired soldier with a red nose, who described how he had run away from Mons “with the rest of you,” and the lightheartedness of a performance which could have gone straight to a London music-hall and brought down the house with jokes and songs made up in dugouts and front-line trenches. + 

At first the audience sat silent, with glazed eyes. It was difficult to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the trenches was still on them. They stank of the trenches, and the stench was in their souls. Presently they began to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes. They laughed!⁠ ⁠… Later, from this audience of soldiers there were yells of laughter, though the effect of shells arriving at unexpected moments, in untoward circumstances, was a favorite theme of the jesters. Many of the men were going into the trenches that night again, and there would be no fun in the noise of the shells, but they went more gaily and with stronger hearts, I am sure, because of the laughter which had roared through the old sugar-factory. + 

A night or two later I went to another concert and heard the same gaiety of men who had been through a year of war. It was in an open field, under a velvety sky studded with innumerable stars. Nearly a thousand soldiers trooped through the gates and massed before the little canvas theater. In front a small crowd of Flemish children squatted on the grass, not understanding a word of the jokes, but laughing in shrill delight at the antics of soldier-Pierrots. The corner-man was a funny fellow, and his byplay with a stout Flemish woman round the flap of the canvas screen, to whom he made amorous advances while his comrades were singing sentimental ballads, was truly comic. The hit of the evening was when an Australian behind the stage gave an unexpected imitation of a laughing-jackass. + 

There was something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side said: “Well done! Exactly right!” and the Flemish children shrieked with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers, who had great emotion and broke down sometimes in the middle of a verse. There were funny men dressed in the Widow Twankey style, or in burlesque uniforms, who were greeted with yells of laughter by their comrades. An Australian giant played some clever card tricks, and another Australian recited Kipling’s “Gunga Din” with splendid fire. And between every “turn” the soldiers in the field roared out a chorus: + 

“Jolly good song, + 

Jolly well sung. + 

If you can think of a better you’re welcome to try. + 

But don’t forget the singer is dry; + 

Give the poor beggar some beer!” + 

A touring company of mouth-organ musicians was having a great success in the war zone. But, apart from all those organized methods of mirth, there was a funny man in every billet who played the part of court jester, and clowned it whatever the state of the weather or the risks of war. The British soldier would have his game of “house” or “crown and anchor” even on the edge of the shell-storm, and his little bit of sport wherever there was room to stretch his legs. It was a jesting army (though some of its jokes were very grim), and those who saw, as I did, the daily tragedy of war, never ceasing, always adding to the sum of human suffering, were not likely to discourage that sense of humor. + 

A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and tissue-paper and penny whistles was given by the Guards in the front-line trenches near Loos. They played old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion and technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. The Germans crowded into their front line⁠—not far away⁠—and applauded each number. Presently, in good English, a German voice shouted across: + 

“Play ‘Annie Laurie’ and I will sing it.” + 

The Guards played “Annie Laurie,” and a German officer stood up on the parapet⁠—the evening sun was red behind him⁠—and sang the old song admirably, with great tenderness. There was applause on both sides. + 

“Let’s have another concert tomorrow!” shouted the Germans. + 

But there was a different kind of concert next day, and the music was played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, rifle-grenades, and other instruments of death in possession of the Guards. There were cries of agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter. + 

XVI + 

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality⁠—I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of halftones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French château, or at a mess-table. + 

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, bloodlust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. + 

Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The wartime humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. + 

So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon⁠—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairytale. + 

So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle⁠—three notches one night⁠—to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite. + 

In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon those who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the roulette-table⁠ ⁠… One day, when the German gunners were putting over a special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to inquire about a “new chum,” who had come up with the drafts. + 

“Is Private Smith all right?” he asked. + 

“Yes, Sergeant, he’s all right,” answered the men crouching in the dark hole. + 

“Private Smith isn’t wounded yet?” asked the, sergeant again, five minutes later. + 

“No, Sergeant.” + 

Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being. + 

“That sergeant seems a very kind man,” said the boy. “Seems to love me like a father!” + 

A yell of laughter answered him. + 

“You poor, bleeding fool!” said one of his comrades. “He’s drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you’d been hit.” + 

In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sandbags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches. + 

“Bit of Bill,” said the leading man, putting in a leg. + 

“Another bit of Bill,” he said, unearthing a hand. + 

“Bill’s ugly mug,” he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found. + 

As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it. + 

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!” + 

“Not so much of your ‘Mercy, Kamerad,’ ” said the cockney. “ ’And us over your bloody ticker!” + 

It was the man’s watch he wanted, without sentiment. + 

One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war. + 

“Where’s your prisoner?” asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal. + 

“I lost him on the way, sir,” said the corporal. + 

“Lost him?” + 

The corporal was embarrassed. + 

“Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I’d been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I ’ave two kiddies at ’ome, sir, and I couldn’t ’elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he’d never see her again. When he started cryin’ I was so sorry for him I couldn’t stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter.” + 

Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice-eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men’s souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear. + 

“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn’t do to take this war seriously.” + 

And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes: + 

“That there Grand Fleet of ours don’t seem to be very active, sir. It’s a pity it don’t come down these blinkin’ trenches and do a bit of work!” + 

“Having a cleanup, my man?” said a brigadier to a soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug. + 

“Yes, sir,” said the man, “and I wish I was a blasted canary.” + 

One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them something interesting. + 

“Interesting?” said the colonel. “Do they think this war is a peepshow for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a massacre to make a London holiday?” Then his voice changed and he laughed. “Show them something interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that.” + 

He did. When the two M.P.’s arrived, apparently at the front-line trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret, for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were defending their position desperately. + 

“We hope for the best,” he said, “and I think there is just a chance that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly.” + 

“Great God!” said one of the M.P.’s, and the other was silent, but pale. + 

Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle-grenades and throwing bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, “We won’t go home till morning,” in a most heroic way⁠ ⁠… The battle lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his visitors: + 

“The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear.” + 

One of the M.P.’s was thrilled with excitement. “The valor of your men was marvelous,” he said. “What impressed me most was the cheerfulness of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the stretchers.” + 

The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. “Funny devils!” he said. “They are so glad to be going home.” + 

The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle⁠—not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward. + 

XVII + 

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous night-birds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with the enemy’s strength) and a cheery, vital man. + 

“This war has produced two great dugouts,” said Lord Kitchener on a visit to the convent. “Me and Baker-Carr.” + 

It was the boys who interested me more than the machines. (I was never much interested in the machinery of war.) They came down from the trenches to this school with a sense of escape from prison, and for the ten days of their course they were like “freshers” at Oxford and made the most of their minutes, organizing concerts and other entertainments in the evenings after their initiation into the mysteries of Vickers and Lewis. I was invited to dinner there one night, and sat between two young cavalry officers on long benches crowded with subalterns of many regiments. It was a merry meal and a good one⁠—to this day I remember a potato pie, gloriously baked, and afterward, as it was the last night of the course, all the officers went wild and indulged in a “rag” of the public-school kind. They straddled across the benches and barged at each other in single tourneys and jousts, riding their hobbyhorses with violent rearings and plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt and with yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery crashed upon the polished boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables, others were waltzing down the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory, and hunting-men cried the “View halloo!” and shouted “Yoicks! yoicks!”⁠ ⁠… General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own room that night and let discipline go hang.⁠ ⁠… + 

When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death⁠—Belville Wood, Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March 21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought until the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin. Two of them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that night, and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice. Of the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their laughter ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried alive, and some were blinded and gassed, and some went “missing” forevermore. + 

XVIII + 

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the willpower, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough in the trenches, where men looked across the parapet to the same corner of hell day by day, to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sandbags in the enemy’s line, to the blasted tree sliced by shellfire, the upturned railway-truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the skyline, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In “quiet” sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual shellfire or snipers’ bullets, and that became part of the boredom. “What casualties?” asked the adjutant in his dugout. + 

“Two killed, three wounded, sir.” + 

“Very well⁠ ⁠… You can go.” + 

A salute in the doorway of the dugout, a groan from the adjutant lighting another cigarette, leaning with his elbow on the deal table, staring at the guttering of the candle by his side, at the pile of forms in front of him, at the glint of light on the steel helmet hanging by its strap on a nail near the shelf where he kept his safety-razor, flash-lamp, love-letters (in an old cigar-box), soap, whisky-bottle (almost empty now), and an unread novel. + 

“Hell!⁠ ⁠… What a life!” + 

But there was always work to do, and odd incidents, and frights, and responsibilities. + 

It was worse⁠—this boredom⁠—for men behind the lines; in lorry columns which went from railhead to dump every damned morning, and back again by the middle of the morning, and then nothing else to do for all the day, in a cramped little billet with a sulky woman in the kitchen, and squealing children in the yard, and a stench of manure through the small window. A dull life for an actor who had toured in England and America (like one I met dazed and stupefied by years of boredom⁠—paying too much for safety), or for a barrister who had many briefs before the war and now found his memory going, though a young man, because of the narrow limits of his life between one Flemish village and another, which was the length of his lorry column and of his adventure of war. Nothing ever happened to break the monotony⁠—not even shellfire. So it was also in small towns like Hesdin, St.-Pol, Bruay, Lillers⁠—a hundred others where officers stayed for years in charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor battalions, administration offices, claim commissions, graves’ registration, agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of jobs connected with that life of war, but not exciting. + 

Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were tempted to take to drink, to look around for unattached women, to gamble at cards with any poor devil like themselves. Those were most bored who were most virtuous. For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no possibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless they were mystics, as some became, who found God good company and needed no other help. They had rare luck, those fellows with an astounding faith which rose above the irony and the brutality of that business being done in the trenches, but there were few of them. + 

Even with hours of leisure, men who had been “bookish” could not read. That was a common phenomenon. I could read hardly at all, for years, and thousands were like me. The most “exciting” novel was dull stuff up against that world convulsion. What did the romance of love mean, the little tortures of one man’s heart, or one woman’s, troubled in their mating, when thousands of men were being killed and vast populations were in agony? History⁠—Greek or Roman or medieval⁠—what was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world history was being made with a rush? Poetry⁠—poor poets with their love of beauty! What did beauty matter, now that it lay dead in the soul of the world, under the filth of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and the law of the apelike man? No⁠—we could not read; but talked and talked about the old philosophy of life, and the structure of society, and Democracy and Liberty and Patriotism and Internationalism, and Brotherhood of Men, and God, and Christian ethics; and then talked no more, because all words were futile, and just brooded and brooded, after searching the daily paper (two days old) for any kind of hope and light, not finding either. + 

XIX + 

At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the cheerful shout of “Now we shan’t be long!” before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army boys who followed them were desperate to get out to “the great adventure.” They cursed the length of their training in English camps. “We shan’t get out till it’s too late!” they said. Too late, O God! Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches and came up against German strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that “something” would happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come. Peace was always coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-officers, as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism, not based on any kind of reason; but gradually it died out, and in its place came the awful conviction which settled upon the hearts of the fighting-men, that this war would go on forever, that it was their doom always to live in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of escape was by a “Blighty” wound or by death. + 

A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent boys by pretending to have special knowledge of inside politics. + 

“I have it on good authority,” he said, “that peace is near at hand. There have been negotiations in Paris⁠—” + 

Or: + 

“I don’t mind telling you lads that if you get through the next scrap you will have peace before you know where you are.” + 

They were not believing, now. He had played that game too often. + 

“Old stuff, padre!” they said. + 

That particular crowd did not get through the next scrap. But the padre’s authority was good. They had peace long before the armistice. + 

It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who were lucky enough to get a “cushie” wound, and so went on and on, or who were patched up again quickly after one, two, or three wounds, and came back again. It was a boy like that who revealed his bitterness to me one day as we stood together in the salient. + 

“It’s the length of the war,” he said, “which does one down. At first it seemed like a big adventure, and the excitement of it, horrible though it was, kept one going. Even the first time I went over the top wasn’t so bad as I thought it would be. I was dazed and drunk with all sorts of emotions, including fear, that were worse before going over. I had what we call ‘the needle.’ They all have it. Afterward one didn’t know what one was doing⁠—even the killing part of the business⁠—until one reached the objective and lay down and had time to think and to count the dead about⁠ ⁠… Now the excitement has gone out of it, and the war looks as though it would go on forever. At first we all searched the papers for some hope that the end was near. We don’t do that now. We know that whenever the war ends, this year or next, this little crowd will be mostly wiped out. Bound to be. And why are we going to die? That’s what all of us want to know. What’s it all about? Oh yes, I know the usual answers: ‘In defense of liberty,’ ‘To save the Empire.’ But we’ve all lost our liberty. We’re slaves under shellfire. And as for the Empire⁠—I don’t give a curse for it. I’m thinking only of my little home at Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun? I’ve no quarrel with the poor blighters over there by Hooge. They are in the same bloody mess as we are. They hate it just as much. We’re all under a spell together, which some devils have put on us. I wonder if there’s a God anywhere.” + 

This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other men, and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: “This war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell.” This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which gunfire is at so long a range that shellfire has the quality of natural and elemental powers of death⁠—like thunderbolts⁠—and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in busy villages had no thought of a human enemy desiring their individual death. + 

God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds of simple lads desiring life and not death. They could not reconcile the Christian precepts of the chaplain with the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles of the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the fields of France and Flanders seemed to them⁠—to many of them, I know⁠—a certain proof that God did not exist, or if He did exist was not, as they were told, a God of Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of men. That at least was the thought expressed to me by some London lads who argued the matter with me one day, and that was the thought which our army chaplains had to meet from men who would not be put off by conventional words. It was not good enough to tell them that the Germans were guilty of all this crime and that unless the Germans were beaten the world would lose its liberty and life. “Yes, we know all that,” they said, “but why did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen who arranged the world by force, or the clergy who christened British warships? And how is it that both sides pray to the same God for victory? There must be something wrong somewhere.” + 

It was not often men talked like that, except to some chaplain who was a human, comradely soul, some Catholic “padre” who devoted himself fearlessly to their bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with them, or to some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa under shellfire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of “Keep your hearts up, my lads, and your heads down.” + 

Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions in the place of faith. “It’s no good worrying,” they said. + 

“If your name is written on a German shell you can’t escape it, and if it isn’t written, nothing can touch you.” + 

Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and superstitions which amused them and helped them. “Have the Huns found you out yet?” I asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. “Not yet,” said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them ardently. They were touching wood. + 

“Take this with you,” said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres. “It will help you as it has helped me. It’s my lucky charm.” He gave me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was so earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer for it. + 

Once in a while the men went home on seven days’ leave, or four, and then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of England because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering, so utterly without understanding, so “damned cheerful.” They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, “If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause.” They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send zeppelins to England⁠—to make the people know what war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all. + 

From a weekend at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped away from the pier, the M.T.O. and a small group of officers, detectives, and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and the “revenants” on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a widening strip of sea. + 

“Back to the bloody old trenches,” said a voice, and the words ended with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards, whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying goodbye to a pretty woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!” Afterward he had sat in the corner of his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb⁠—an accident of war.) + 

A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, “You know who I am, don’t you, sir?” + 

I hadn’t the least idea who he was⁠—this little ginger-haired soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the claret-colored ribbon of the V.C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name, and said the papers had “done him proud,” and that they had made a lot of him at home⁠—presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor’s addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes, though one couldn’t tell it by the look of him. + 

“Now I’m going back to the trenches,” he said, gloomily. “Same old business and one of the crowd again.” He was suffering from the reaction of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a humming song in its stomach. + 

France⁠ ⁠… and the beginning of what the little V.C. had called “the same old business.” There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way down the Strand. + 

Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man’s tunic. Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The same old business and the same old pluck. + 

I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward that network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few days’ leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and smells which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live through the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of Flanders. + 

The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before, there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September afternoon. The smell of Flemish villages⁠—a mingled odor of sunbaked thatch and bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up through the centuries⁠—was overborne by a new and more pungent aroma which crept over the fields with the evening haze. + 

It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine. + 

Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were keen, to mind its menace⁠—those soldiers who came marching down the road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would “grouse” at the duration of the war and swear that he was “fed up” with it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The hammering of shellfire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the shell-shock cases. + 

But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of whizzbangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay and chloride of lime, and the life of earthmen who once belonged to a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way, because it was the very best thing to do. + 

One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the “feel” of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one’s way down country lanes⁠—“The Veritable Cuckoo” and “The Lost Corner” and “The Flower of the Fields”⁠—and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant shellfire. Ugh! + 

So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in the marketplace of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last passed this way. + 

London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident and school the more enduring experience. + 

There were no new impressions, only the repetition of old impressions. So I found when I heard the guns again and watched the shells bursting about Ypres and over Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower. + 

Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum of their engines was loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. Our shrapnel burst about them, but did not touch their wings. All around there was the slamming of great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles. No amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was just the commonplace of life out here. + 

The routine of it went on. The officer who came back from home stepped into his old place, and after the first greeting of, “Hullo, old man! Had a good time?” found his old job waiting for him. So there was a new brigadier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove! + 

Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, and it was rotten bad luck that the sergeant-major should have been among them. A real good fellow. However, there’s that court martial for this afternoon, and, by the by, when is that timber coming up? Can’t build the new dugout if there’s no decent wood to be got by stealing or otherwise. You heard how the men got strafed in their billets the other day? Dirty work! + 

The man who had come back went into the trenches and had a word or two with the N.C.O.’s. Then he went into his own dugout. The mice had been getting at his papers. Oh yes, that’s where he left his pipe! It was lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped it before going on leave. The clay walls were a bit wet after the rains. He stood with a chilled feeling in this little hole of his, staring at every familiar thing in it. + 

Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He said goodbye to her at Victoria Station. How long ago? Surely more than seven hours, or seven years⁠ ⁠… Outside there were the old noises. The guns were at it again. That was a trench-mortar. The enemy’s eight-inch howitzers were plugging away. What a beastly row that machine-gun was making! Playing on the same old spot. Why couldn’t they leave it alone, the asses?⁠ ⁠… Anyhow, there was no doubt about it⁠—he had come back again. Back to the trenches and the same old business. + 

There was a mine to be blown up that night and it would make a pretty mess in the enemy’s lines. The colonel was very cheerful about it, and explained that a good deal of sapping had been done. “We’ve got the bulge on ’em,” he said, referring to the enemy’s failures in this class of work. In the mess all the officers were carrying on as usual, making the same old jokes. + 

The man who had come back got back also the spirit of the thing with astonishing rapidity. That other life of his, away there in old London, was shut up in the cupboard of his heart. + 

So it went on and on until the torture of its boredom was broken by the crash of big battles, and the New Armies, which had been learning lessons in the School of Courage, went forward to the great test, and passed, with honor. + 