summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
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      The Glory of the Trenches, by Coningsby Dawson
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<pre>

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Glory of the Trenches, by Coningsby Dawson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The Glory of the Trenches

Author: Coningsby Dawson

Commentator: W. J. Dawson


Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7515]
This file was first posted on May 13, 2003
Last Updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES ***




Text file produced by Tiffany Vergon, Brendan Lane, Edward Johnson,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

HTML file produced by David Widger




</pre>

    <div style="height: 8em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h1>
      THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
    </h1>
    <h3>
      AN INTERPRETATION
    </h3>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      By Coningsby Dawson
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h4>
      Author of &ldquo;Carry On: Letters In Wartime,&rdquo; Etc. <br /> <br /> With An
      Introduction By His Father, W. J. Dawson <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &ldquo;The
      glory is all in the souls of the men&mdash;<br /> it's nothing external.&rdquo;
       &mdash;From &ldquo;Carry On&rdquo; <br /> <br /> 1917
    </h4>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      TO YOU AT HOME
    </h2>

          <pre xml:space="preserve">
             Each night we panted till the runners came,
               Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
             Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
               Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
             In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
               Then down the road where no one goes by day,
             And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
               Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
             Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
               Of old defences tangles up the feet;
             Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
               Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
             Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
               Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
             Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
               We knew we should not hear from you that day&mdash;
             From you, who from the trenches of the mind
               Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
             Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
               That you for us may take the sting from Death.
          </pre>

    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      <b>CONTENTS</b>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> TO YOU AT HOME </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> IN HOSPITAL </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> I. THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> THE LADS AWAY </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> II. THE GROWING OF THE VISION </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES </a>
    </p>
    <p class="toc">
      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> III. GOD AS WE SEE HIM </a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
    </h2>
    <p>
      In my book, <i>The Father of a Soldier</i>, I have already stated the
      conditions under which this book of my son's was produced.
    </p>
    <p>
      He was wounded in the end of June, 1917, in the fierce struggle before
      Lens. He was at once removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a
      military hospital in London. There was grave danger of amputation of the
      right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use his hand
      he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of Canada to write an
      important paper, detailing the history of the Canadian forces in France
      and Flanders. This task kept him busy until the end of August, when he
      obtained a leave of two months to come home. He arrived in New York in
      September, and returned again to London in the end of October.
    </p>
    <p>
      The plan of the book grew out of his conversations with us and the three
      public addresses which he made. The idea had already been suggested to him
      by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. He had written a few hundred
      words, but had no very keen sense of the value of the experiences he had
      been invited to relate. He had not even read his own published letters in
      <i>Carry On</i>. He said he had begun to read them when the book reached
      him in the trenches, but they made him homesick, and he was also afraid
      that his own estimate of their value might not coincide with ours, or with
      the verdict which the public has since passed upon them. He regarded his
      own experiences, which we found so thrilling, in the same spirit of modest
      depreciation. They were the commonplaces of the life which he had led, and
      he was sensitive lest they should be regarded as improperly heroic. No one
      was more astonished than he when he found great throngs eager to hear him
      speak. The people assembled an hour before the advertised time, they
      stormed the building as soon as the doors were open, and when every inch
      of room was packed they found a way in by the windows and a fire-escape.
      This public appreciation of his message indicated a value in it which he
      had not suspected, and led him to recognise that what he had to say was
      worthy of more than a fugitive utterance on a public platform. He at once
      took up the task of writing this book, with a genuine and delighted
      surprise that he had not lost his love of authorship. He had but a month
      to devote to it, but by dint of daily diligence, amid many interruptions
      of a social nature, he finished his task before he left. The concluding
      lines were actually written on the last night before he sailed for
      England.
    </p>
    <p>
      We discussed several titles for the book. <i>The Religion of Heroism</i>
      was the title suggested by Mr. John Lane, but this appeared too didactic
      and restrictive. I suggested <i>Souls in Khaki</i>, but this admirable
      title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on <i>The Glory of
      the Trenches</i>, as the most expressive of his aim. He felt that a great
      deal too much had been said about the squalor, filth, discomfort and
      suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a very popular war-book
      which we were then reading had six paragraphs in the first sixty pages
      which described in unpleasant detail the verminous condition of the men,
      as if this were the chief thing to be remarked concerning them. He held
      that it was a mistake for a writer to lay too much stress on the horrors
      of war. The effect was bad physiologically&mdash;it frightened the parents
      of soldiers; it was equally bad for the enlisted man himself, for it
      created a false impression in his mind. We all knew that war was horrible,
      but as a rule the soldier thought little of this feature in his lot. It
      bulked large to the civilian who resented inconvenience and discomfort,
      because he had only known their opposites; but the soldier's real thoughts
      were concerned with other things. He was engaged in spiritual acts. He was
      accomplishing spiritual purposes as truly as the martyr of faith and
      religion. He was moved by spiritual impulses, the evocation of duty, the
      loyal dependence of comradeship, the spirit of sacrifice, the complete
      surrender of the body to the will of the soul. This was the side of war
      which men needed most to recognise. They needed it not only because it was
      the true side, but because nothing else could kindle and sustain the
      enduring flame of heroism in men's hearts.
    </p>
    <p>
      While some erred in exhibiting nothing but the brutalities of war, others
      erred by sentimentalising war. He admitted that it was perfectly possible
      to paint a portrait of a soldier with the aureole of a saint, but it would
      not be a representative portrait. It would be eclectic, the result of
      selection elimination. It would be as unlike the common average as Rupert
      Brooke, with his poet's face and poet's heart, was unlike the ordinary
      naval officers with whom he sailed to the AEgean.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ordinary soldier is an intensely human creature, with an &ldquo;endearing
      blend of faults and virtues.&rdquo; The romantic method of portraying him not
      only misrepresented him, but its result is far less impressive than a
      portrait painted in the firm lines of reality. There is an austere
      grandeur in the reality of what he is and does which needs no fine gilding
      from the sentimentalist. To depict him as a Sir Galahad in holy armour is
      as serious an offence as to exhibit him as a Caliban of marred clay; each
      method fails of truth, and all that the soldier needs to be known about
      him, that men should honour him, is the truth.
    </p>
    <p>
      What my son aimed at in writing this book was to tell the truth about the
      men who were his comrades, in so far as it was given him to see it. He was
      in haste to write while the impression was fresh in his mind, for he knew
      how soon the fine edge of these impressions grew dull as they receded from
      the immediate area of vision. &ldquo;If I wait till the war is over, I shan't be
      able to write of it at all,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You've noticed that old soldiers
      are very often silent men. They've had their crowded hours of glorious
      life, but they rarely tell you much about them. I remember you used to
      tell me that you once knew a man who sailed with Napoleon to St Helena,
      but all he could tell you was that Napoleon had a fine leg and wore white
      silk stockings. If he'd written down his impressions of Napoleon day by
      day as he watched him walking the deck of the <i>Bellerophon</i>, he'd
      have told you a great deal more about him than that he wore white silk
      stockings. If I wait till the war is over before I write about it, it's
      very likely I shall recollect only trivial details, and the big heroic
      spirit of the thing will escape me. There's only one way of recording an
      impression&mdash;catch it while it's fresh, vivid, vital; shoot it on the
      wing. If you wait too long it will vanish.&rdquo; It was because he felt in this
      way that he wrote in red-hot haste, sacrificing his brief leave to the
      task, and concentrating all his mind upon it.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was one impression that he was particularly anxious to record,&mdash;his
      sense of the spiritual processes which worked behind the grim offence of
      war, the new birth of religious ideas, which was one of its most wonderful
      results. He had both witnessed and shared this renascence. It was too
      indefinite, too immature to be chronicled with scientific accuracy, but it
      was authentic and indubitable. It was atmospheric, a new air which men
      breathed, producing new energies and forms of thought. Men were
      rediscovering themselves, their own forgotten nobilities, the latent
      nobilities in all men. Bound together in the daily obedience of
      self-surrender, urged by the conditions of their task to regard duty as
      inexorable, confronted by the pitiless destruction of the body, they were
      forced into a new recognition of the spiritual values of life. In the
      common conventional use of the term these men were not religious. There
      was much in their speech and in their conduct which would outrage the
      standards of a narrow pietism. Traditional creeds and forms of faith had
      scant authority for them. But they had made their own a surer faith than
      lives in creeds. It was expressed not in words but acts. They had freed
      their souls from the tyrannies of time and the fear of death. They had
      accomplished indeed that very emancipation of the soul which is the
      essential evangel of all religions, which all religions urge on men, but
      which few men really achieve, however earnestly they profess the forms of
      pious faith.
    </p>
    <p>
      This was the true Glory of the Trenches. They were the Calvaries of a new
      redemption being wrought out for men by soiled unconscious Christs. And,
      as from that ancient Calvary, with all its agony of shame, torture and
      dereliction, there flowed a flood of light which made a new dawn for the
      world, so from these obscure crucifixions there would come to men a new
      revelation of the splendour of the human soul, the true divinity that
      dwells in man, the God made manifest in the flesh by acts of valour,
      heroism, and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts and promptings
      of the flesh, and bear witness to the indestructible life of the spirit.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is to express these thoughts and convictions that this book was
      written. It is a record of things deeply felt, seen and experienced&mdash;this,
      first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is recorded is incidental and
      implicit. It is left to the discovery of the reader, and yet is so plainly
      indicated that he cannot fail to discover it. We shall all see this war
      quite wrongly, and shall interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents,
      if we see it only as a human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet
      more miserably if all our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from
      its physical horror, &ldquo;the deformations of our common manhood&rdquo; on the
      battlefield, the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it
      in its real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which
      direct it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out
      the deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened
      civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs.
      Browning, writing on <i>The Greek Christian Poets</i>, used a striking
      sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new
      emphasis. &ldquo;We want,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the touch of Christ's hand upon our
      literature, as it touched other dead things&mdash;we want the sense of the
      saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may cry
      through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
      humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been
      perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest.&rdquo; It is this glory of
      divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because the
      writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among things
      terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.
    </p>
    <h3>
      W. J. DAWSON.
    </h3>
    <p>
      February, 1918.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      IN HOSPITAL
    </h2>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
   Hushed and happy whiteness,
     Miles on miles of cots,
   The glad contented brightness
     Where sunlight falls in spots.

   Sisters swift and saintly
     Seem to tread on grass;
   Like flowers stirring faintly,
     Heads turn to watch them pass.

   Beauty, blood, and sorrow,
     Blending in a trance&mdash;
   Eternity's to-morrow
     In this half-way house of France.

   Sounds of whispered talking,
     Laboured indrawn breath;
   Then like a young girl walking
     The dear familiar Death.
</pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      I. THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
    </h2>
    <p>
      I am in hospital in London, lying between clean white sheets and feeling,
      for the first time in months, clean all over. At the end of the ward there
      is a swinging door; if I listen intently in the intervals when the
      gramophone isn't playing, I can hear the sound of bath-water running&mdash;running
      in a reckless kind of fashion as if it didn't care how much was wasted. To
      me, so recently out of the fighting and so short a time in Blighty, it
      seems the finest music in the world. For the sheer luxury of the contrast
      I close my eyes against the July sunlight and imagine myself back in one
      of those narrow dug-outs where it isn't the thing to undress because the
      row may start at any minute.
    </p>
    <p>
      Out there in France we used to tell one another fairy-tales of how we
      would spend the first year of life when war was ended. One man had a baby
      whom he'd never seen; another a girl whom he was anxious to marry. My
      dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic&mdash;it began and ended with
      a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first three hundred and
      sixty-five mornings after peace had been declared I was to be wakened by
      the sound of my bath being filled; water was to be so plentiful that I
      could tumble off to sleep again without even troubling to turn off the
      tap. In France one has to go dirty so often that the dream of being always
      clean seems as unrealisable as romance. Our drinking-water is frequently
      brought up to us at the risk of men's lives, carried through the mud in
      petrol-cans strapped on to packhorses. To use it carelessly would be like
      washing in men's blood&mdash;&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      And here, most marvellously, with my dream come true, I lie in the whitest
      of white beds. The sunlight filters through trees outside the window and
      weaves patterns on the floor. Most wonderful of all is the sound of the
      water so luxuriously running. Some one hops out of bed and re-starts the
      gramophone. The music of the bath-room tap is lost.
    </p>
    <p>
      Up and down the ward, with swift precision, nurses move softly. They have
      the unanxious eyes of those whose days are mapped out with duties. They
      rarely notice us as individuals. They ask no questions, show no curiosity.
      Their deeds of persistent kindness are all performed impersonally. It's
      the same with the doctors. This is a military hospital where discipline is
      firmly enforced; any natural recognition of common fineness is
      discouraged. These women who have pledged themselves to live among
      suffering, never allow themselves for a moment to guess what the sight of
      them means to us chaps in the cots. Perhaps that also is a part of their
      sacrifice. But we follow them with our eyes, and we wish that they would
      allow themselves to guess. For so many months we have not seen a woman;
      there have been so many hours when we expected never again to see a woman.
      We're Lazaruses exhumed and restored to normal ways of life by the fluke
      of having collected a bit of shrapnel&mdash;we haven't yet got used to
      normal ways. The mere rustle of a woman's skirt fills us with unreasonable
      delight and makes the eyes smart with memories of old longings. Those
      childish longings of the trenches! No one can understand them who has not
      been there, where all personal aims are a wash-out and the courage to
      endure remains one's sole possession.
    </p>
    <p>
      The sisters at the Casualty Clearing Station&mdash;they understood. The
      Casualty Clearing Station is the first hospital behind the line to which
      the wounded are brought down straight from the Dressing-Stations. All day
      and all night ambulances come lurching along shell-torn roads to their
      doors. The men on the stretchers are still in their bloody tunics,
      rain-soaked, pain-silent, splashed with the corruption of fighting&mdash;their
      bodies so obviously smashed and their spirits so obviously unbroken. The
      nurses at the Casualty Clearing Station can scarcely help but understand.
      They can afford to be feminine to men who are so weak. Moreover, they are
      near enough the Front to share in the sublime exaltation of those who
      march out to die. They know when a big offensive is expected, and prepare
      for it. They are warned the moment it has commenced by the distant thunder
      of the guns. Then comes the ceaseless stream of lorries and ambulances
      bringing that which has been broken so quickly to them to be patched up in
      months. They work day and night with a forgetfulness of self which equals
      the devotion of the soldiers they are tending. Despite their orderliness
      they seem almost fanatical in their desire to spend themselves. They are
      always doing, but they can never do enough. It's the same with the
      surgeons. I know of one who during a great attack operated for forty-eight
      hours on end and finally went to sleep where he stood from utter
      weariness. The picture that forms in my mind of these women is absurd,
      Arthurian and exact; I see them as great ladies, mediaeval in their
      saintliness, sharing the pollution of the battle with their champions.
    </p>
    <p>
      Lying here with nothing to worry about in the green serenity of an English
      summer, I realize that no man can grasp the splendour of this war until he
      has made the trip to Blighty on a stretcher. What I mean is this: so long
      as a fighting man keeps well, his experience of the war consists of muddy
      roads leading up through a desolated country to holes in the ground, in
      which he spends most of his time watching other holes in the ground, which
      people tell him are the Hun front-line. This experience is punctuated by
      periods during which the earth shoots up about him like corn popping in a
      pan, and he experiences the insanest fear, if he's made that way, or the
      most satisfying kind of joy. About once a year something happens which,
      when it's over, he scarcely believes has happened: he's told that he can
      run away to England and pretend that there isn't any war on for ten days.
      For those ten days, so far as he's concerned, hostilities are suspended.
      He rides post-haste through ravaged villages to the point from which the
      train starts. Up to the very last moment until the engine pulls out, he's
      quite panicky lest some one shall come and snatch his warrant from him,
      telling him that leave has been cancelled. He makes his journey in a
      carriage in which all the windows are smashed. Probably it either snows or
      rains. During the night while he stamps his feet to keep warm, he
      remembers that in his hurry to escape he's left all his Hun souvenirs
      behind. During his time in London he visits his tailor at least twice a
      day, buys a vast amount of unnecessary kit, sleeps late, does most of his
      resting in taxi-cabs, eats innumerable meals at restaurants, laughs at a
      great many plays in which life at the Front is depicted as a joke. He
      feels dazed and half suspects that he isn't in London at all, but only
      dreaming in his dug-out. Some days later he does actually wake up in his
      dug-out; the only proof he has that he's been on leave is that he can't
      pay his mess-bill and is minus a hundred pounds. Until a man is wounded he
      only sees the war from the point of view of the front-line and
      consequently, as I say, misses half its splendour, for he is ignorant of
      the greatness of the heart that beats behind him all along the lines of
      communication. Here in brief is how I found this out.
    </p>
    <p>
      The dressing-station to which I went was underneath a ruined house, under
      full observation of the Hun and in an area which was heavily shelled. On
      account of the shelling and the fact that any movement about the place
      would attract attention, the wounded were only carried out by night.
      Moreover, to get back from the dressing-station to the collecting point in
      rear of the lines, the ambulances had to traverse a white road over a
      ridge full in view of the enemy. The Huns kept guns trained on this road
      and opened fire at the least sign of traffic. When I presented myself I
      didn't think that there was anything seriously the matter; my arm had
      swelled and was painful from a wound of three days' standing. The doctor,
      however, recognised that septic poisoning had set in and that to save the
      arm an operation was necessary without loss of time. He called a sergeant
      and sent him out to consult with an ambulance-driver. &ldquo;This officer ought
      to go out at once. Are you willing to take a chance?&rdquo; asked the sergeant.
      The ambulance-driver took a look at the chalk road gleaming white in the
      sun where it climbed the ridge. &ldquo;Sure, Mike,&rdquo; he said, and ran off to
      crank his engine and back his car out of its place of concealment. &ldquo;Sure,
      Mike,&rdquo;&mdash;that was all. He'd have said the same if he'd been asked
      whether he'd care to take a chance at Hell.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have three vivid memories of that drive. The first, my own uneasy sense
      that I was deserting. Frankly I didn't want to go out; few men do when it
      comes to the point. The Front has its own peculiar exhilaration, like big
      game-hunting, discovering the North Pole, or anything that's dangerous;
      and it has its own peculiar reward&mdash;the peace of mind that comes of
      doing something beyond dispute unselfish and superlatively worth while.
      It's odd, but it's true that in the front-line many a man experiences
      peace of mind for the first time and grows a little afraid of a return to
      normal ways of life. My second memory is of the wistful faces of the chaps
      whom we passed along the road. At the unaccustomed sound of a car
      travelling in broad daylight the Tommies poked their heads out of
      hiding-places like rabbits. Such dirty Tommies! How could they be
      otherwise living forever on old battlefields? If they were given time for
      reflection they wouldn't want to go out; they'd choose to stay with the
      game till the war was ended. But we caught them unaware, and as they gazed
      after us down the first part of the long trail that leads back from the
      trenches to Blighty, there was hunger in their eyes. My third memory is of
      kindness.
    </p>
    <p>
      You wouldn't think that men would go to war to learn how to be kind&mdash;but
      they do. There's no kinder creature in the whole wide world than the
      average Tommy. He makes a friend of any stray animal he can find. He
      shares his last franc with a chap who isn't his pal. He risks his life
      quite inconsequently to rescue any one who's wounded. When he's gone over
      the top with bomb and bayonet for the express purpose of &ldquo;doing in&rdquo; the
      Hun, he makes a comrade of the Fritzie he captures. You'll see him coming
      down the battered trenches with some scared lad of a German at his side.
      He's gabbling away making throat-noises and signs, smiling and doing his
      inarticulate best to be intelligible. He pats the Hun on the back, hands
      him chocolate and cigarettes, exchanges souvenirs and shares with him his
      last luxury. If any one interferes with his Fritzie he's willing to fight.
      When they come to the cage where the prisoner has to be handed over, the
      farewells of these companions whose acquaintance has been made at the
      bayonet-point are often as absurd as they are affecting. I suppose one
      only learns the value of kindness when he feels the need of it himself.
      The men out there have said &ldquo;Good-bye&rdquo; to everything they loved, but
      they've got to love some one&mdash;so they give their affections to
      captured Fritzies, stray dogs, fellows who've collected a piece of a shell&mdash;in
      fact to any one who's a little worse off than themselves. My
      ambulance-driver was like that with his &ldquo;Sure, Mike.&rdquo; He was like it
      during the entire drive. When he came to the white road which climbs the
      ridge with all the enemy country staring at it, it would have been
      excusable in him to have hurried. The Hun barrage might descend at any
      minute. All the way, in the ditches on either side, dead pack animals lay;
      in the dug-outs there were other unseen dead making the air foul. But he
      drove slowly and gently, skirting the shell-holes with diligent care so as
      to spare us every unnecessary jolting. I don't know his name, shouldn't
      recognise his face, but I shall always remember the almost womanly
      tenderness of his driving.
    </p>
    <p>
      After two changes into other ambulances at different distributing points,
      I arrived about nine on a summer's evening at the Casualty Clearing
      Station. In something less than an hour I was undressed and on the
      operating table.
    </p>
    <p>
      You might suppose that when for three interminable years such a stream of
      tragedy has flowed through a hospital, it would be easy for surgeons and
      nurses to treat mutilation and death perfunctorily. They don't. They show
      no emotion. They are even cheerful; but their strained faces tell the
      story and their hands have an immense compassion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two faces especially loom out. I can always see them by lamp-light, when
      the rest of the ward is hushed and shrouded, stooping over some silent
      bed. One face is that of the Colonel of the hospital, grey, concerned,
      pitiful, stern. His eyes seem to have photographed all the suffering which
      in three years they have witnessed. He's a tall man, but he moves softly.
      Over his uniform he wears a long white operating smock&mdash;he never
      seems to remove it. And he never seems to sleep, for he comes wandering
      through his Gethsemane all hours of the night to bend over the more
      serious cases. He seems haunted by a vision of the wives, mothers,
      sweethearts, whose happiness is in his hands. I think of him as a Christ
      in khaki.
    </p>
    <p>
      The other face is of a girl&mdash;a sister I ought to call her. She's the
      nearest approach to a sculptured Greek goddess I've seen in a living
      woman. She's very tall, very pale and golden, with wide brows and big grey
      eyes like Trilby. I wonder what she did before she went to war&mdash;for
      she's gone to war just as truly as any soldier. I'm sure in the peaceful
      years she must have spent a lot of time in being loved. Perhaps her man
      was killed out here. Now she's ivory-white with over-service and spends
      all her days in loving. Her eyes have the old frank, innocent look, but
      they're ringed with being weary. Only her lips hold a touch of colour;
      they have a childish trick of trembling when any one's wound is hurting
      too much. She's the first touch of home that the stretcher-cases see when
      they've said good-bye to the trenches. She moves down the ward; eyes
      follow her. When she is absent, though others take her place, she leaves a
      loneliness. If she meant much to men in days gone by, to-day she means
      more than ever. Over many dying boys she stoops as the incarnation of the
      woman whom, had they lived, they would have loved. To all of us, with the
      blasphemy of destroying still upon us, she stands for the divinity of
      womanhood.
    </p>
    <p>
      What sights she sees and what words she hears; yet the pity she brings to
      her work preserves her sweetness. In the silence of the night those who
      are delirious re-fight their recent battles. You're half-asleep, when in
      the darkened ward some one jumps up in bed, shouting, &ldquo;Hold your bloody
      hands up.&rdquo; He thinks he's capturing a Hun trench, taking prisoners in a
      bombed in dug-out. In an instant, like a mother with a frightened child,
      she's bending over him; soon she has coaxed his head back on the pillow.
      Men do not die in vain when they evoke such women. And the men&mdash;the
      chaps in the cots! As a patient the first sight you have of them is a
      muddy stretcher. The care with which the bearers advance is only equalled
      by the waiters in old-established London Clubs when they bring in one of
      their choicest wines. The thing on the stretcher looks horribly like some
      of the forever silent people you have seen in No Man's Land. A pair of
      boots you see, a British Warm flung across the body and an arm dragging. A
      screen is put round a bed; the next sight you have of him is a weary face
      lying on a white pillow. Soon the chap in the bed next to him is
      questioning.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;What's yours?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Machine-gun caught me in both legs.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Going to lose 'em?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Don't know. Can't feel much at present. Hope not.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Then the questioner raises himself on his elbow. &ldquo;How's it going?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      <i>It</i> is the attack. The conversation that follows is always how we're
      hanging on to such and such an objective and have pushed forward three
      hundred yards here or have been bent back there. One thing you notice:
      every man forgets his own catastrophe in his keenness for the success of
      the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty did I hear a
      word of self-pity or complaining. On the contrary, the most severely
      wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they had got off so
      lightly. Since the war started the term &ldquo;lightly&rdquo; has become exceedingly
      comparative. I suppose a man is justified in saying he's got off lightly
      when what he expected was death.
    </p>
    <p>
      I remember a big Highland officer who had been shot in the knee-cap. He
      had been operated on and the knee-cap had been found to be so splintered
      that it had had to be removed; of this he was unaware. For the first day
      as he lay in bed he kept wondering aloud how long it would be before he
      could re-join his battalion. Perhaps he suspected his condition and was
      trying to find out. All his heart seemed set on once again getting into
      the fighting. Next morning he plucked up courage to ask the doctor, and
      received the answer he had dreaded.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Never. You won't be going back, old chap.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Next time he spoke his voice was a bit throaty. &ldquo;Will it stiffen?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;You've lost the knee-joint,&rdquo; the doctor said, &ldquo;but with luck we'll save
      the leg.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      His voice sank to a whisper. &ldquo;If you do, it won't be much good, will it?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Not much.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      He lay for a couple of hours silent, readjusting his mind to meet the new
      conditions. Then he commenced talking with cheerfulness about returning to
      his family. The habit of courage had conquered&mdash;the habit of courage
      which grows out of the knowledge that you let your pals down by showing
      cowardice.
    </p>
    <p>
      The next step on the road to Blighty is from the Casualty Station to a
      Base Hospital in France. You go on a hospital train and are only allowed
      to go when you are safe to travel. There is always great excitement as to
      when this event will happen; its precise date usually depends on what's
      going on up front and the number of fresh casualties which are expected.
      One morning you awake to find that a tag has been prepared, containing the
      entire medical history of your injury. The stretcher-bearers come in with
      grins on their faces, your tag is tied to the top button of your pyjamas,
      jocular appointments are made by the fellows you leave behind&mdash;many
      of whom you know are dying&mdash;to meet you in London, and you are
      carried out. The train is thoroughly equipped with doctors and nurses; the
      lying cases travel in little white bunks. No one who has not seen it can
      have any idea of the high good spirits which prevail. You're going off to
      Blighty, to Piccadilly, to dry boots and clean beds. The revolving wheels
      underneath you seem to sing the words, &ldquo;Off to Blighty&mdash;to Blighty.&rdquo;
       It begins to dawn on you what it will be like to be again your own master
      and to sleep as long as you like.
    </p>
    <p>
      Kindness again&mdash;always kindness! The sisters on the train can't do
      enough; they seem to be trying to exceed the self-sacrifice of the sisters
      you have left behind. You twist yourself so that you can get a glimpse of
      the flying country. It's green, undisturbed, unmarred by shells&mdash;there
      are even cows!
    </p>
    <p>
      At the Base Hospital to which I went there was a man who performed
      miracles. He was a naturalised American citizen, but an Armenian by birth.
      He gave people new faces.
    </p>
    <p>
      The first morning an officer came in to visit a friend; his face was
      entirely swathed in bandages, with gaps left for his breathing and his
      eyes. He had been like that for two years, and looked like a leper. When
      he spoke he made hollow noises. His nose and lower jaw had been torn away
      by an exploding shell. Little by little, with infinite skill, by the
      grafting of bone and flesh, his face was being built up. Could any surgery
      be more merciful?
    </p>
    <p>
      In the days that followed I saw several of these masked men. The worst
      cases were not allowed to walk about. The ones I saw were invariably
      dressed with the most scrupulous care in the smartest uniforms, Sam Browns
      polished and buttons shining. They had hope, and took a pride in
      themselves&mdash;a splendid sign! Perhaps you ask why the face-cases
      should be kept in France. I was not told, but I can guess&mdash;because
      they dread going back to England to their girls until they've got rid of
      their disfigurements. So for two years through their bandages they watch
      the train pull out for Blighty, while the damage which was done them in
      the fragment of a second is repaired.
    </p>
    <p>
      At a Base Hospital you see something which you don't see at a Casualty
      Station&mdash;sisters, mothers, sweethearts and wives sitting beside the
      beds. They're allowed to come over from England when their man is dying.
      One of the wonderful things to me was to observe how these women in the
      hour of their tragedy catch the soldier spirit. They're very quiet, very
      cheerful, very helpful. With passing through the ward they get to know
      some of the other patients and remember them when they bring their own man
      flowers. Sometimes when their own man is asleep, they slip over to other
      bedsides and do something kind for the solitary fellows. That's the army
      all over; military discipline is based on unselfishness. These women who
      have been sent for to see their men die, catch from them the spirit of
      undistressed sacrifice and enrol themselves as soldiers.
    </p>
    <p>
      Next to my bed there was a Colonel of a north country regiment, a gallant
      gentleman who positively refused to die. His wife had been with him for
      two weeks, a little toy woman with nerves worn to a frazzle, who masked
      her terror with a brave, set smile. The Colonel had had his leg smashed by
      a whizz-bang when leading his troops into action. Septic poisoning had set
      in and the leg had been amputated. It had been found necessary to operate
      several times owing to the poison spreading, with the result that, being
      far from a young man, his strength was exhausted. Men forgot their own
      wounds in watching this one man's fight for life. He became symbolic of
      what, in varying degrees, we were all doing. When he was passing through a
      crisis the whole ward waited breathless. There was the finest kind of
      rivalry between the night and day sisters to hand him over at the end of
      each twelve hours with his pulse stronger and temperature lower than when
      they received him. Each was sure she had the secret of keeping him alive.
    </p>
    <p>
      You discovered the spirit of the man when you heard him wandering in
      delirium. All night in the shadowy ward with its hooded lamps, he would be
      giving orders for the comfort of his men. Sometimes he'd be proposing to
      go forward himself to a place where a company was having a hot time;
      apparently one of his officers was trying to dissuade him. &ldquo;Danger be
      damned,&rdquo; he'd exclaim in a wonderfully strong voice. &ldquo;It'll buck 'em up to
      see me. Splendid chaps&mdash;splendid chaps!&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      About dawn he was usually supposed to be sinking, but he'd rallied again
      by the time the day-sister arrived. &ldquo;Still here,&rdquo; he'd smile in a
      triumphant kind of whisper, as though bluffing death was a pastime.
    </p>
    <p>
      One afternoon a padre came to visit him. As he was leaving he bent above
      the pillow. We learnt afterwards that this was what he had said, &ldquo;If the
      good Lord lets you, I hope you'll get better.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      We saw the Colonel raise himself up on his elbow. His weak voice shook
      with anger. &ldquo;Neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with it. I'm
      going to get well.&rdquo; Then, as the nurse came hurrying to him, he sank back.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I left the Base Hospital for Blighty he was still holding his own. I
      have never heard what happened to him, but should not be at all surprised
      to meet him one day in the trenches with a wooden leg, still leading his
      splendid chaps. Death can't kill men of such heroic courage.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the Base Hospital they talk a good deal of &ldquo;the Blighty Smile.&rdquo; It's
      supposed to be the kind of look a chap wears when he's been told that
      within twenty-four hours he'll be in England. When this information has
      been imparted to him, he's served out with warm socks, woollen cap and a
      little linen bag into which to put his valuables. Hours and hours before
      there's any chance of starting you'll see the lucky ones lying very still,
      with a happy vacant look in their eyes and their absurd woollen caps stuck
      ready on their heads. Sometime, perhaps in the small hours of the morning,
      the stretcher-bearers, arrive&mdash;the stretcher-bearers who all down the
      lines of communication are forever carrying others towards blessedness and
      never going themselves. &ldquo;At last,&rdquo; you whisper to yourself. You feel a
      glorious anticipation that you have not known since childhood when, after
      three hundred and sixty-four days of waiting, it was truly going to be
      Christmas.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the train and on the passage there is the same skillful attention&mdash;the
      same ungrudging kindness. You see new faces in the bunks beside you. After
      the tedium of the narrow confines of a ward that in itself is exciting.
      You fall into talk.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;What's yours?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Nothing much&mdash;just a hand off and a splinter or two in the
      shoulder.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      You laugh. &ldquo;That's not so dusty. How much did you expect for your money?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Probably you meet some one from the part of the line where you were
      wounded&mdash;with luck even from your own brigade, battery or battalion.
      Then the talk becomes all about how things are going, whether we're still
      holding on to our objectives, who's got a blighty and who's gone west. One
      discussion you don't often hear&mdash;as to when the war will end. To
      these civilians in khaki it seems that the war has always been and that
      they will never cease to be soldiers. For them both past and future are
      utterly obliterated. They would not have it otherwise. Because they are
      doing their duty they are contented. The only time the subject is ever
      touched on is when some one expresses the hope that it'll last long enough
      for him to recover from his wounds and get back into the line. That
      usually starts another man, who will never be any more good for the
      trenches, wondering whether he can get into the flying corps. The one
      ultimate hope of all these shattered wrecks who are being hurried to the
      Blighty they have dreamt of, is that they may again see service.
    </p>
    <p>
      The tang of salt in the air, the beat of waves and then, incredible even
      when it has been realised, England. I think they ought to make the
      hospital trains which run to London all of glass, then instead of watching
      little triangles of flying country by leaning uncomfortably far out of
      their bunks, the wounded would be able to drink their full of the
      greenness which they have longed for so many months. The trees aren't
      charred and blackened stumps; they're harps between the knees of the
      hills, played on by the wind and sun. The villages have their roofs on and
      children romping in their streets. The church spires haven't been knocked
      down; they stand up tall and stately. The roadsides aren't littered with
      empty shell-cases and dead horses. The fields are absolutely fields, with
      green crops, all wavy, like hair growing. After the tonsured filth we've
      been accustomed to call a world, all this strikes one as unnatural and
      extraordinary. There's a sweet fragrance over everything and one's throat
      feels lumpy. Perhaps it isn't good for people's health to have lumpy
      throats, and that's why they don't run glass trains to London.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then, after such excited waiting, you feel that the engine is slowing
      down. There's a hollow rumbling; you're crossing the dear old wrinkled
      Thames. If you looked out you'd see the dome of St. Paul's like a bubble
      on the sky-line and smoking chimneys sticking up like thumbs&mdash;things
      quite ugly and things of surpassing beauty, all of which you have never
      hoped to see again and which in dreams you have loved. But if you could
      look out, you wouldn't have the time. You're getting your things together,
      so you won't waste a moment when they come to carry you out. Very probably
      you're secreting a souvenir or two about your person: something you've
      smuggled down from the front which will really prove to your people that
      you've made the acquaintance of the Hun. As though your wounds didn't
      prove that sufficiently. Men are childish.
    </p>
    <p>
      The engine comes to a halt. You can smell the cab-stands. You're really
      there. An officer comes through the train enquiring whether you have any
      preference as to hospitals. Your girl lives in Liverpool or Glasgow or
      Birmingham. Good heavens, the fellow holds your destiny in his hands! He
      can send you to Whitechapel if he likes. So, even though he has the same
      rank as yourself, you address him as, &ldquo;Sir.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps it's because I've practised this diplomacy&mdash;I don't know.
      Anyway, he's granted my request. I'm to stay in London. I was particularly
      anxious to stay in London, because one of my young brothers from the Navy
      is there on leave at present. In fact he wired me to France that the
      Admiralty had allowed him a three-days' special extension of leave in
      order that he might see me. It was on the strength of this message that
      the doctors at the Base Hospital permitted me to take the journey several
      days before I was really in a condition to travel.
    </p>
    <p>
      I'm wondering whether he's gained admission to the platform. I lie there
      in my bunk all eyes, expecting any minute to see him enter. Time and again
      I mistake the blue serge uniform of the St. John's Ambulance for that of a
      naval lieutenant. They come to carry me out. What an extraordinarily funny
      way to enter London&mdash;on a stretcher! I've arrived on boat-trains from
      America, troop trains from Canada, and come back from romantic romps in
      Italy, but never in my wildest imaginings did I picture myself arriving as
      a wounded soldier on a Red Cross train.
    </p>
    <p>
      Still clutching my absurd linen bag, which contains my valuables, I lift
      my head from the pillow gazing round for any glimpse of that much-desired
      brother. Now they've popped me onto the upper-shelf of a waiting
      ambulance; I can see nothing except what lies out at the back. I at once
      start explaining to the nurse who accompanies us that I've lost a very
      valuable brother&mdash;that he's probably looking for me somewhere on the
      station. She's extremely sympathetic and asks the chauffeur to drive very
      slowly so that we may watch for him as we go through the station gates
      into the Strand.
    </p>
    <p>
      We're delayed for some minutes while particulars are checked up of our
      injuries and destinations. The lying cases are placed four in an
      ambulance, with the flap raised at the back so we can see out. The sitting
      cases travel in automobiles, buses and various kinds of vehicles. In my
      ambulance there are two leg-cases with most theatrical bandages, and one
      case of trench-fever. We're immensely merry&mdash;all except the
      trench-fever case who has conceived an immense sorrow for himself. We get
      impatient with waiting. There's an awful lot of cheering going on
      somewhere; we suppose troops are marching and can't make it out.
    </p>
    <p>
      Ah, we've started! At a slow crawl to prevent jarring we pass through the
      gates. We discover the meaning of the cheering. On either side the people
      are lined in dense crowds, waving and shouting. It's Saturday evening when
      they should be in the country. It's jolly decent of them to come here to
      give us such a welcome. Flower-girls are here with their baskets full of
      flowers&mdash;just poor girls with a living to earn. They run after us as
      we pass and strew us with roses. Roses! We stretch out our hands, pressing
      them to our lips. How long is it since we held roses in our hands? How did
      these girls of the London streets know that above all things we longed for
      flowers? It was worth it all, the mud and stench and beastliness, when it
      was to this that the road led back. And the girls&mdash;they're even
      better than the flowers; so many pretty faces made kind by compassion.
      Somewhere inside ourselves we're laughing; we're so happy. We don't need
      any one's pity; time enough for that when we start to pity ourselves. We
      feel mean, as though we were part of a big deception. We aren't half so
      ill as we look; if you put sufficient bandages on a wound you can make the
      healthiest man appear tragic. We're laughing&mdash;and then all of a
      sudden we're crying. We press our faces against the pillow ashamed of
      ourselves. We won't see the crowds; we're angry with them for having
      unmanned us. And then we can't help looking; their love reaches us almost
      as though it were the touch of hands. We won't hide ourselves if we mean
      so much to them. We're not angry any more, but grateful.
    </p>
    <p>
      Suddenly the ambulance-nurse shouts to the driver. The ambulance stops.
      She's quite excited. Clutching me with one hand, she points with the
      other, &ldquo;There he is.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      I raise myself. A naval lieutenant is standing against the pavement,
      gazing anxiously at the passing traffic.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Your brother, isn't it?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      I shook my head. &ldquo;Not half handsome enough.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      For the rest of the journey she's convinced I have a headache. It's no
      good telling her that I haven't; much to my annoyance and amusement she
      swabs my forehead with eau-de-Cologne, telling me that I shall soon feel
      better.
    </p>
    <p>
      The streets through which we pass are on the south side of the Thames.
      It's Saturday evening. Hawkers' barrows line the kerb; women with draggled
      skirts and once gay hats are doing their Sunday shopping. We're having a
      kind of triumphant procession; with these people to feel is to express. We
      catch some of their remarks: &ldquo;'Oo! Look at 'is poor leg!&rdquo; &ldquo;My, but ain't
      'e done in shockin'!&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Dear old London&mdash;so kind, so brave, so frankly human! You're just
      like the chaps at the Front&mdash;you laugh when you suffer and give when
      you're starving; you never know when not to be generous. You wear your
      heart in your eyes and your lips are always ready for kissing, I think of
      you as one of your own flower-girls&mdash;hoarse of voice, slatternly as
      to corsets, with a big tumbled fringe over your forehead, and a heart so
      big that you can chuck away your roses to a wounded Tommy and go away
      yourself with an empty basket to sleep under an archway. Do you wonder
      that to us you spell Blighty? We love you.
    </p>
    <p>
      We come to a neighbourhood more respectable and less demonstrative, skirt
      a common, are stopped at a porter's lodge and turn into a parkland. The
      glow of sunset is ended; the blue-grey of twilight is settling down.
      Between flowered borders we pick our way, pause here and there for
      directions and at last halt. Again the stretcher-bearers! As I am carried
      in I catch a glimpse of a low bungalow-building, with others like it
      dotted about beneath trees. There are red shaded lamps. Every one tiptoes
      in silence. Only the lips move when people speak; there is scarcely any
      sound. As the stretchers are borne down the ward men shift their heads to
      gaze after them. It's past ten o'clock and patients are supposed to be
      sleeping now. I'm put to bed. There's no news of my brother; he hasn't
      'phoned and hasn't called. I persuade one of the orderlies to ring up the
      hotel at which I know he was staying. The man is a long while gone.
      Through the dim length of the ward I watch the door into the garden,
      momentarily expecting the familiar figure in the blue uniform and gold
      buttons to enter. He doesn't. Then at length the orderly returns to tell
      me that the naval lieutenant who was staying at the hotel, had to set out
      for his ship that evening, as there was no train that he could catch on
      Sunday. So he was steaming out of London for the North at the moment I was
      entering. Disappointed? Yes. One shrugs his shoulders. <i>C'est la guerre</i>,
      as we say in the trenches. You can't have everything when Europe's at war.
    </p>
    <p>
      I can hardly keep awake long enough for the sister to dress my arm. The
      roses that the flower-girls had thrown me are in water and within
      handstretch. They seem almost persons and curiously sacred&mdash;symbols
      of all the heroism and kindness that has ministered to me every step of
      the journey. It's a good little war I think to myself. Then, with the
      green smell of England in my nostrils and the rumbling of London in my
      ears, like conversation below stairs, I drowse off into the utter
      contentment of the first deep sleep I have had since I was wounded.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am roused all too soon by some one sticking a thermometer into my mouth.
      Rubbing my eyes, I consult my watch. Half-past five! Rather early! Raising
      myself stealthily, I catch a glimpse of a neat little sister darting down
      the ward from bed to bed, tent-pegging every sleeping face with a fresh
      thermometer. Having made the round, back she comes to take possession of
      my hand while she counts my pulse. I try to speak, but she won't let me
      remove the accursed thermometer; when she has removed it herself, off she
      goes to the next bed. I notice that she has auburn hair, merry blue eyes
      and a ripping Irish accent. I learn later that she's a Sinn Feiner, a
      sworn enemy to England who sings &ldquo;Dark Rosaleen&rdquo; and other rebel songs in
      the secret watches of the night. It seems to me that in taking care of
      England's wounded she's solving the Irish problem pretty well.
    </p>
    <p>
      Heavens, she's back again, this time with a bowl of water and a towel!
      Very severely and thoroughly, as though I were a dirty urchin, she scrubs
      my face and hands. She even brushes my hair. I watch her do the same for
      other patients, some of whom are Colonels and old enough to be her father.
      She's evidently in no mood for proposals of marriage at this early hour,
      for her technique is impartially severe to everybody, though her blue eyes
      are unfailingly laughing.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is at this point that somebody crawls out of bed, slips into a
      dressing-gown, passes through the swing door at the end of the ward and
      sets the bath-water running. The sound of it is ecstatic.
    </p>
    <p>
      Very soon others follow his example. They're chaps without legs, with an
      arm gone, a hand gone, back wounds, stomach wounds, holes in the head.
      They start chaffing one another. There's no hint of tragedy. A gale of
      laughter sweeps the ward from end to end. An Anzac captain is called on
      for a speech. I discover that he is our professional comic man and is
      called on to make speeches twenty times a day. They always start with,
      &ldquo;Gentlemen, I will say this&mdash;&rdquo; and end with a flourish in praise of
      Australia. Soon the ward is made perilous by wheel-chairs, in which
      unskilful pilots steer themselves out into the green adventure of the
      garden. Birds are singing out there; the guns had done for the birds in
      the places where we came from. Through open doors we can see the glow of
      flowers, dew-laden and sparkling, lazily unfolding their petals in the
      early sun.
    </p>
    <p>
      When the sister's back is turned, a one-legged officer nips out of bed and
      hops like a crow to the gramophone. The song that follows is a favourite.
      Curious that it should be, for it paints a dream which to many of these
      mutilated men&mdash;Canadians, Australians, South Africans, Imperials&mdash;will
      have to remain only a dream, so long as life lasts. Girls don't marry
      fellows without arms and legs&mdash;at least they didn't in peace days
      before the world became heroic. As the gramophone commences to sing, heads
      on pillows hum the air and fingers tap in time on the sheets. It's a
      peculiarly childish song for men who have seen what they have seen and
      done what they have done, to be so fond of. Here's the way it runs:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
&ldquo;We'll have a little cottage in a little town
 And well have a little mistress in a dainty gown,
 A little doggie, a little cat,
 A little doorstep with WELCOME on the mat;
 And we'll have a little trouble and a little strife,
 But none of these things matter when you've got a little wife.
 We shall be as happy as the angels up above
 With a little patience and a lot of love.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      A little patience and a lot of love! I suppose that's the line that's
      caught the chaps. Behind all their smiling and their boyish gaiety they
      know that they'll need both patience and love to meet the balance of
      existence with sweetness and soldierly courage. It won't be so easy to be
      soldiers when they get back into mufti and go out into the world cripples.
      Here in their pyjamas in the summer sun, they're making a first class
      effort. I take another look at them. No, there'll never be any whining
      from men such as these.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some of us will soon be back in the fighting&mdash;and jolly glad of it.
      Others are doomed to remain in the trenches for the rest of their lives&mdash;not
      the trenches of the front-line where they've been strafed by the Hun, but
      the trenches of physical curtailment where self-pity will launch wave
      after wave of attack against them. It won't be easy not to get the &ldquo;wind
      up.&rdquo; It'll be difficult to maintain normal cheerfulness. But they're not
      the men they were before they went to war&mdash;out there they've learnt
      something. They're game. They'll remain soldiers, whatever happens.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      THE LADS AWAY
    </h2>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
   All the lads have gone out to play
   At being soldiers, far away;
   They won't be back for many a day,
   And some won't be back any morning.

   All the lassies who laughing were
   When hearts were light and lads were here,
   Go sad-eyed, wandering hither and there&mdash;
   They pray and they watch for the morning.

   Every house has its vacant bed
   And every night, when sounds are dead,
   Some woman yearns for the pillowed head
   Of him who marched out in the morning.

   Of all the lads who've gone out to play
   There's some'll return and some who'll stay;
   There's some will be back 'most any day&mdash;
   But some won't wake up in the morning.
</pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      II. THE GROWING OF THE VISION
    </h2>
    <p>
      I'm continuing in America the book which I thought out during the golden
      July and August days when I lay in the hospital in London. I've been here
      a fortnight; everything that's happened seems unbelievably wonderful, as
      though it had happened to some one other than myself. It'll seem still
      more wonderful in a few weeks' time when I'm where I hope I shall be&mdash;back
      in the mud at the Front.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here's how this miraculous turn of events occurred. When I went before my
      medical board I was declared unfit for active service for at least two
      months. A few days later I went in to General Headquarters to see what
      were the chances of a trip to New York. The officer whom I consulted
      pulled out his watch, &ldquo;It's noon now. There's a boat-train leaving Euston
      in two and a half hours. Do you think you can pack up and make it?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      <i>Did I think</i>!
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;You watch me,&rdquo; I cried.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dashing out into Regent Street I rounded up a taxi and raced about London
      like one possessed, collecting kit, visiting tailors, withdrawing money,
      telephoning friends with whom I had dinner and theatre engagements. It's
      an extraordinary characteristic of the Army, but however hurried an
      officer may be, he can always spare time to visit his tailor. The fare I
      paid my taxi-driver was too monstrous for words; but then he'd missed his
      lunch, and one has to miss so many things in war-times that when a new
      straw of inconvenience is piled on the camel, the camel expects to be
      compensated. Anyway, I was on that boat-train when it pulled out of
      London.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was in uniform when I arrived in New York, for I didn't possess any
      mufti. You can't guess what a difference that made to one's home-coming&mdash;not
      the being in uniform, but the knowing that it wasn't an offence to wear
      it. On my last leave, some time ago before I went overseas, if I'd tried
      to cross the border from Canada in uniform I'd have been turned back; if
      by any chance I'd got across and worn regimentals I'd have been arrested
      by the first Irish policeman. A place isn't home where you get turned back
      or locked up for wearing the things of which you're proudest. If America
      hadn't come into the war none of us who have loved her and since been to
      the trenches, would ever have wanted to return.
    </p>
    <p>
      But she's home now as she never was before and never could have been under
      any other circumstances&mdash;now that khaki strides unabashed down
      Broadway and the skirl of the pipers has been heard on Fifth Avenue. We
      men &ldquo;over there&rdquo; will have to find a new name for America. It won't be
      exactly Blighty, but a kind of very wealthy first cousin to Blighty&mdash;a
      word meaning something generous and affectionate and steam-heated, waiting
      for us on the other side of the Atlantic.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two weeks here already&mdash;two weeks more to go; then back to the glory
      of the trenches!
    </p>
    <p>
      There's one person I've missed since my return to New York. I've caught
      glimpses of him disappearing around corners, but he dodges. I think he's a
      bit ashamed to meet me. That person is my old civilian self. What a
      full-blown egoist he used to be! How full of golden plans for his own
      advancement! How terrified of failure, of disease, of money losses, of
      death&mdash;of all the temporary, external, non-essential things that have
      nothing to do with the spirit! War is in itself damnable&mdash;a
      profligate misuse of the accumulated brain-stuff of centuries.
      Nevertheless, there's many a man who has no love of war, who previous to
      the war had cramped his soul with littleness and was chased by the bayonet
      of duty into the blood-stained largeness of the trenches, who has learnt
      to say, &ldquo;Thank God for this war.&rdquo; He thanks God not because of the
      carnage, but because when the wine-press of new ideals was being trodden,
      he was born in an age when he could do his share.
    </p>
    <p>
      America's going through just about the same experience as myself. She's
      feeling broader in the chest, bigger in the heart and her eyes are
      clearer. When she catches sight of the America that she was, she's filled
      with doubt&mdash;she can't believe that that person with the Stars and
      Stripes wrapped round her and a money-bag in either hand ever was herself.
      Home, clean and honourable for every man who ever loved her and has
      pledged his life for an ideal with the Allies&mdash;that's what she's
      become now.
    </p>
    <p>
      I read again the words that I wrote about those chaps in the London
      hospital, men who had journeyed to their Calvary glad-hearted from the
      farthest corners of the world. From this distance I see them in truer
      perspective than when we lay companions side by side in that long line of
      neat, white cots. I used to grope after ways to explain them&mdash;to
      explain the courage which in their utter heroism they did not realise they
      possessed. They had grown so accustomed to a brave way of living that they
      sincerely believed they were quite ordinary persons. That's courage at its
      finest&mdash;when it becomes unconscious and instinctive.
    </p>
    <p>
      At first I said, &ldquo;I know why they're so cheerful&mdash;it's because
      they're all here in one ward together. They're all mutilated more or less,
      so they don't feel that they're exceptional. It's as though the whole
      world woke up with toothache one morning. At breakfast every one would be
      feeling very sorry for himself; by lunch-time, when it had become common
      knowledge that the entire world had the same kind of ache, toothache would
      have ceased to exist. It's the loneliness of being abnormal in your
      suffering that hurts.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      But it wasn't that. Even while I was confined to the hospital, in hourly
      contact with the chaps, I felt that it wasn't that. When I was allowed to
      dress and go down West for a few hours everyday, I knew that I was wrong
      most certainly. In Piccadilly, Hyde Park, theatres, restaurants,
      river-places on the Thames you'd see them, these men who were maimed for
      life, climbing up and down buses, hobbling on their crutches independently
      through crowds, hailing one another cheerily from taxis, drinking life
      joyously in big gulps without complaint or sense of martyrdom, and getting
      none of the dregs. A part of their secret was that through their
      experience in the trenches they had learnt to be self-forgetful. The only
      time I ever saw a wounded man lose his temper was when some one out of
      kindness made him remember himself. A sudden down-pour of rain had
      commenced; it was towards evening and all the employees of the West End
      shopping centre were making haste to get home to the suburbs. A young
      Highland officer who had lost a leg scrambled into a bus going to
      Wandsworth. The inside of the bus was jammed, so he had to stand up
      clutching on to a strap. A middle-aged gentleman rose from his seat and
      offered it to the Highlander. The Highlander smiled his thanks and shook
      his head. The middle-aged gentleman in his sympathy became pressing,
      attracting attention to the officer's infirmity. It was then that the
      officer lost his temper. I saw him flush.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;I don't want it,&rdquo; he said sharply. &ldquo;There's nothing the matter with me.
      Thanks all the same. I'll stand.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      This habit of being self-forgetful gives one time to be remindful of
      others. Last January, during a brief and glorious ten days' leave, I went
      to a matinée at the Coliseum. Vesta Tilley was doing an extraordinarily
      funny impersonation of a Tommy just home from the comfort of the trenches;
      her sketch depicted the terrible discomforts of a fighting man on leave in
      Blighty. If I remember rightly the refrain of her song ran somewhat in
      this fashion:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
&ldquo;Next time they want to give me six days' leave
 Let 'em make it six months' 'ard.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      There were two officers, a major and a captain, behind us; judging by the
      sounds they made, they were getting their full money's worth of enjoyment.
      In the interval, when the lights went up, I turned and saw the captain
      putting a cigarette between the major's lips; then, having gripped a
      match-box between his knees so that he might strike the match, he lit the
      cigarette for his friend very awkwardly. I looked closer and discovered
      that the laughing captain had only one hand and the equally happy major
      had none at all.
    </p>
    <p>
      Men forget their own infirmities in their endeavour to help each other.
      Before the war we had a phrase which has taken on a new meaning now; we
      used to talk about &ldquo;lending a hand.&rdquo; To-day we lend not only hands, but
      arms and eyes and legs. The wonderful comradeship learnt in the trenches
      has taught men to lend their bodies to each other&mdash;out of two maimed
      bodies to make up one which is whole, and sound, and shared. You saw this
      all the time in hospital. A man who had only one leg would pal up with a
      man who had only one arm. The one-armed man would wheel the one-legged man
      about the garden in a chair; at meal-times the one-legged man would cut up
      the one-armed man's food for him. They had both lost something, but by
      pooling what was left they managed to own a complete body. By the time the
      war is ended there'll be great hosts of helpless men who by combining will
      have learnt how to become helpful. They'll establish a new standard of
      very simple and cheerful socialism.
    </p>
    <p>
      There's a point I want to make clear before I forget it. All these men,
      whether they're capturing Hun dug-outs at the Front or taking prisoner
      their own despair in English hospitals, are perfectly ordinary and normal.
      Before the war they were shop-assistants, cab-drivers, plumbers, lawyers,
      vaudeville artists. They were men of no heroic training. Their civilian
      callings and their previous social status were too various for any one to
      suppose that they were heroes ready-made at birth. Something has happened
      to them since they marched away in khaki&mdash;something that has changed
      them. They're as completely re-made as St. Paul was after he had had his
      vision of the opening heavens on the road to Damascus. They've brought
      their vision back with them to civilian life, despite the lost arms and
      legs which they scarcely seem to regret; their souls still triumph over
      the body and the temporal. As they hobble through the streets of London,
      they display the same gay courage that was theirs when at zero hour, with
      a fifty-fifty chance of death, they hopped over the top for the attack.
    </p>
    <p>
      Often at the Front I have thought of Christ's explanation of his own
      unassailable peace&mdash;an explanation given to his disciples at the Last
      Supper, immediately before the walk to Gethsemane: &ldquo;Be of good cheer, I
      have overcome the world.&rdquo; Overcoming the world, as I understand it, is
      overcoming self. Fear, in its final analysis, is nothing but selfishness.
      A man who is afraid in an attack, isn't thinking of his pals and how
      quickly terror spreads; he isn't thinking of the glory which will accrue
      to his regiment or division if the attack is a success; he isn't thinking
      of what he can do to contribute to that success; he isn't thinking of the
      splendour of forcing his spirit to triumph over weariness and nerves and
      the abominations that the Huns are chucking at him. He's thinking merely
      of how he can save his worthless skin and conduct his entirely unimportant
      body to a place where there aren't any shells.
    </p>
    <p>
      In London as I saw the work-a-day, unconscious nobility of the maimed and
      wounded, the words, &ldquo;I have overcome the world,&rdquo; took an added depth. All
      these men have an &ldquo;I-have-overcome-the-world&rdquo; look in their faces. It's
      comparatively easy for a soldier with traditions and ideals at his back to
      face death calmly; to be calm in the face of life, as these chaps are,
      takes a graver courage.
    </p>
    <p>
      What has happened to change them? These disabilities, had they happened
      before the war, would have crushed and embittered them. They would have
      been woes utterly and inconsolably unbearable. Intrinsically their
      physical disablements spell the same loss to-day that they would have in
      1912. The attitude of mind in which they are accepted alone makes them
      seem less. This attitude of mind or greatness of soul&mdash;whatever you
      like to call it&mdash;was learnt in the trenches where everything outward
      is polluted and damnable. Their experience at the Front has given them
      what in the Army language is known as &ldquo;guts.&rdquo; &ldquo;Guts&rdquo; or courage is an
      attitude of mind towards calamity&mdash;an attitude of mind which makes
      the honourable accomplishing of duty more permanently satisfying than the
      preservation of self. But how did this vision come to these men? How did
      they rid themselves of their civilian flabbiness and acquire it? These
      questions are best answered autobiographically. Here briefly, is the story
      of the growth of the vision within myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      In August, 1914, three days after war had been declared, I sailed from
      Quebec for England on the first ship that put out from Canada. The trip
      had been long planned&mdash;it was not undertaken from any patriotic
      motive. My family, which included my father, mother, sister and brother,
      had been living in America for eight years and had never returned to
      England together. It was the accomplishing of a dream long cherished,
      which favourable circumstances and a sudden influx of money had at last
      made possible. We had travelled three thousand miles from our ranch in the
      Rockies before the war-cloud burst; obstinacy and curiosity combined made
      us go on, plus an entirely British feeling that by crossing the Atlantic
      during the crisis we'd be showing our contempt for the Germans.
    </p>
    <p>
      We were only informed that the ship was going to sail at the very last
      moment, and went aboard in the evening. The word spread quickly among the
      crews of other vessels lying in harbour; their firemen, keen to get back
      to England and have a whack at the Huns, tried to board our ship,
      sometimes by a ruse, more often by fighting. One saw some very pretty fist
      work that night as he leant across the rail, wondering whether he'd ever
      reach the other side. There were rumours of German warships waiting to
      catch us in mid-ocean. Somewhere towards midnight the would-be stowaways
      gave up their attempt to force a passage; they squatted with their backs
      against the sheds along the quayside, singing patriotic songs to the
      accompaniment of mouth-organs, confidently asserting that they were sons
      of the bull-dog breed and never, never would be slaves. It was all very
      amusing; war seemed to be the finest of excuses for an outburst of high
      spirits.
    </p>
    <p>
      Next morning, when we came on deck for a breath of air the vessel was
      under way; all hands were hard at work disguising her with paint of a
      sombre colour. Here and there you saw an officer in uniform, who had not
      yet had time to unpack his mufti. The next night, and for the rest of the
      voyage, all port-holes were darkened and we ran without lights. An
      atmosphere of suspense became omnipresent. Rumours spread like wild-fire
      of sinkings, victories, defeats, marching and countermarchings,
      engagements on land and water. With the uncanny and unaccustomed sense of
      danger we began to realise that we, as individuals, were involved in a
      European war.
    </p>
    <p>
      As we got about among the passengers we found that the usual spirit of
      comradeship which marks an Atlantic voyage, was noticeably lacking. Every
      person regarded every other person with distrust, as though he might be a
      spy. People were secretive as to their calling and the purpose of their
      voyage; little by little we discovered that many of them were government
      officials, but that most were professional soldiers rushing back in the
      hope that they might be in time to join the British Expeditionary Force.
      Long before we had guessed that a world tragedy was impending, they had
      judged war's advent certain from its shadow, and had come from the most
      distant parts of Canada that they might be ready to embark the moment the
      cloud burst. Some of them were travelling with their wives and children.
      What struck me as wholly unreasonable was that these professional soldiers
      and their families were the least disturbed people on board. I used to
      watch them as one might watch condemned prisoners in their cells. Their
      apparent indifference was unintelligible to me. They lived their daily
      present, contented and unruffled, just as if it were going to be their
      present always. I accused them of being lacking in imagination. I saw them
      lying dead on battlefields. I saw them dragging on into old age, with the
      spine of life broken, mutilated and mauled. I saw them in desperately
      tight corners, fighting in ruined villages with sword and bayonet. But
      they joked, laughed, played with their kiddies and seemed to have no
      realisation of the horrors to which they were going. There was a
      world-famous aviator, who had gone back on his marriage promise that he
      would abandon his aerial adventures. He was hurrying to join the French
      Flying Corps. He and his young wife used to play deck-tennis every morning
      as lightheartedly as if they were travelling to Europe for a lark. In my
      many accusations of these men's indifference I never accused them of
      courage. Courage, as I had thought of it up to that time, was a grim
      affair of teeth set, sad eyes and clenched hands&mdash;the kind of &ldquo;My
      head is bloody but unbowed&rdquo; determination described in Henley's poem.
    </p>
    <p>
      When we had arrived safe in port we were held up for some time. A tug came
      out, bringing a lot of artificers who at once set to work tearing out the
      fittings of the ship that she might be converted into a transport. Here
      again I witnessed a contrast between the soldierly and the civilian
      attitude. The civilians, with their easily postponed engagements, fumed
      and fretted at the delay in getting ashore. The officers took the
      inconvenience with philosophical good-humour. While the panelling and
      electric-light fittings were being ripped out, they sat among the debris
      and played cards. There was heaps of time for their appointment&mdash;it
      was only with wounds and Death. To me, as a civilian, their coolness was
      almost irritating and totally incomprehensible. I found a new explanation
      by saying that, after all, war was their professional chance&mdash;in
      fact, exactly what a shortage in the flour-market was to a man who had
      quantities of wheat on hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      That night we travelled to London, arriving about two o'clock in the
      morning. There was little to denote that a European war was on, except
      that people were a trifle more animated and cheerful. The next day was
      Sunday, and we motored round Hampstead Heath. The Heath was as usual, gay
      with pleasure-seekers and the streets sedate with church-goers. On Monday,
      when we tried to transact business and exchange money, we found that there
      were hitches and difficulties; it was more as though a window had been
      left open and a certain untidiness had resulted. &ldquo;It will be all right
      tomorrow,&rdquo; everybody said. &ldquo;Business as usual,&rdquo; and they nodded.
    </p>
    <p>
      But as the days passed it wasn't all right. Kitchener began to call for
      his army. Belgium was invaded. We began to hear about atrocities. There
      were rumours of defeat, which ceased to be rumours, and of grey hordes
      pressing towards Paris. It began to dawn on the most optimistic of us that
      the little British Army&mdash;the Old Contemptibles&mdash;hadn't gone to
      France on a holiday jaunt.
    </p>
    <p>
      The sternness of the hour was brought home to me by one obscure incident.
      Straggling across Trafalgar Square in mufti and commanded by a sergeant
      came a little procession of recruits. They were roughly dressed men of the
      navy and the coster class. All save one carried under his arm his worldly
      possessions, wrapped in cloth, brown-paper or anything that had come
      handy. The sergeant kept on giving them the step and angrily imploring
      them to pick it up. At the tail of the procession followed a woman; she
      also carried a package.
    </p>
    <p>
      They turned into the Strand, passed by Charing Cross and branched off to
      the right down a lane to the Embankment. At the point where they left the
      Strand, the man without a parcel spoke to the sergeant and fell out of the
      ranks. He laid his clumsy hand on the woman's arm; she set down on the
      pavement the parcel she had been carrying. There they stood for a full
      minute gazing at each other dumbly, oblivious to the passing crowds. She
      wasn't pleasing to look at&mdash;just a slum woman with draggled skirts, a
      shawl gathered tightly round her and a mildewed kind of bonnet. He was no
      more attractive&mdash;a hulking Samson, perhaps a day-labourer, who whilst
      he had loved her, had probably beaten her. They had come to the hour of
      parting, and there they stood in the London sunshine inarticulate after
      life together. He glanced after the procession; it was two hundred yards
      away by now. Stooping awkwardly for the burden which she had carried for
      him, in a shame-faced kind of way he kissed her; then broke from her to
      follow his companions. She watched him forlornly, her hands hanging empty.
      Never once did he look back as he departed. Catching up, he took his place
      in the ranks; they rounded a corner and were lost. Her eyes were quite
      dry; her jaw sagged stupidly. For some seconds she stared after the way he
      had gone&mdash;<i>her man</i>! Then she wandered off as one who had no
      purpose.
    </p>
    <p>
      Wounded men commenced to appear in the streets. You saw them in
      restaurants, looking happy and embarrassed, being paraded by proud
      families. One day I met two in my tailor's shop&mdash;one had an arm in a
      sling, the other's head had been seared by a bullet. It was whispered that
      they were officers who had &ldquo;got it&rdquo; at Mons. A thrill ran through me&mdash;a
      thrill of hero-worship.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square, tragedy bared its broken
      teeth and mouthed at me. We had reached the stage at which we had become
      intensely patriotic by the singing of songs. A beautiful actress, who had
      no thought of doing &ldquo;her bit&rdquo; herself, attired as Britannia, with a
      colossal Union Jack for background, came before the footlights and sang
      the recruiting song of the moment,
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
&ldquo;We don't want to lose you
 But we think you ought to go.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      Some one else recited a poem calculated to shame men into immediate
      enlistment, two lines of which I remember:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
&ldquo;I wasn't among the first to go
 But I went, thank God, I went.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      The effect of such urging was to make me angry. I wasn't going to be
      rushed into khaki on the spur of an emotion picked up in a music-hall. I
      pictured the comfortable gentlemen, beyond the military age, who had
      written these heroic taunts, had gained reputation by so doing, and all
      the time sat at home in suburban security. The people who recited or sung
      their effusions, made me equally angry; they were making sham-patriotism a
      means of livelihood and had no intention of doing their part. All the
      world that by reason of age or sex was exempt from the ordeal of battle,
      was shoving behind all the rest of the world that was not exempt, using
      the younger men as a shield against his own terror and at the same time
      calling them cowards. That was how I felt. I told myself that if I went&mdash;and
      the <i>if</i> seemed very remote&mdash;I should go on a conviction and not
      because of shoving. They could hand me as many white feathers as they
      liked, I wasn't going to be swept away by the general hysteria. Besides,
      where would be the sense in joining? Everybody said that our fellows would
      be home for Christmas. Our chaps who were out there ought to know; in
      writing home they promised it themselves.
    </p>
    <p>
      The next part of the music-hall performance was moving pictures of the
      Germans' march into Brussels. I was in the Promenade and had noticed a
      Belgian soldier being made much of by a group of Tommies. He was a queer
      looking fellow, with a dazed expression and eyes that seemed to focus on
      some distant horror; his uniform was faded and torn&mdash;evidently it had
      seen active service. I wondered by what strange fortune he had been
      conveyed from the brutalities of invasion to this gilded, plush-seated
      sensation-palace in Leicester Square.
    </p>
    <p>
      I watched the screen. Through ghastly photographic boulevards the spectre
      conquerors marched. They came on endlessly, as though somewhere out of
      sight a human dam had burst, whose deluge would never be stopped. I tried
      to catch the expressions of the men, wondering whether this or that or the
      next had contributed his toll of violated women and butchered children to
      the list of Hun atrocities. Suddenly the silence of the theatre was
      startled by a low, infuriated growl, followed by a shriek which was hardly
      human. I have since heard the same kind of sounds when the stumps of the
      mutilated are being dressed and the pain has become intolerable. Everybody
      turned in their seats&mdash;gazing through the dimness to a point in the
      Promenade near to where I was. The ghosts on the screen were forgotten.
      The faked patriotism of the songs we had listened to had become a thing of
      naught. Through the welter of bombast, excitement and emotion we had
      grounded on reality.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Belgian soldier, in his tattered uniform, was leaning out, as though
      to bridge the space that divided him from his ghostly tormentors. The
      dazed look was gone from his expression and his eyes were focussed in the
      fixity of a cruel purpose&mdash;to kill, and kill, and kill the smoke-grey
      hordes of tyrants so long as his life should last. He shrieked
      imprecations at them, calling upon God and snatching epithets from the
      gutter in his furious endeavour to curse them. He was dragged away by
      friends in khaki, overpowered, struggling, smothered but still cursing.
    </p>
    <p>
      I learnt afterwards that he, with his mother and two brothers, had been
      the proprietors of one of the best hotels in Brussels. Both his brothers
      had been called to arms and were dead. Anything might have happened to his
      mother&mdash;he had not heard from her. He himself had escaped in the
      general retreat and was going back to France as interpreter with an
      English regiment. He had lost everything; it was the sight of his ruined
      hotel, flung by chance on the screen, that had provoked his demonstration.
      He was dead to every emotion except revenge&mdash;to accomplish which he
      was returning.
    </p>
    <p>
      The moving-pictures still went on; nobody had the heart to see more of
      them. The house rose, fumbling for its coats and hats; the place was soon
      empty.
    </p>
    <p>
      Just as I was leaving a recruiting sergeant touched my elbow, &ldquo;Going to
      enlist, sonny?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      I shook my head. &ldquo;Not to-night. Want to think it over.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;You will,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Don't wait too long. We can make a man of you. If I
      get you in my squad I'll give you hell.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      I didn't doubt it.
    </p>
    <p>
      I don't know that I'm telling these events in their proper sequence as
      they led up to the growing of the vision. That doesn't matter&mdash;the
      point is that the conviction was daily strengthening that I was needed out
      there. The thought was grotesque that I could ever make a soldier&mdash;I
      whose life from the day of leaving college had been almost wholly
      sedentary. In fights at school I could never hurt the other boy until by
      pain he had stung me into madness. Moreover, my idea of war was grimly
      graphic; I thought it consisted of a choice between inserting a bayonet
      into some one else's stomach or being yourself the recipient. I had no
      conception of the long-distance, anonymous killing that marks our modern
      methods, and is in many respects more truly awful. It's a fact that there
      are hosts of combatants who have never once identified the bodies of those
      for whose death they are personally responsible. My ideas of fighting were
      all of hand-to-hand encounters&mdash;the kind of bloody fighting that
      rejoiced the hearts of pirates. I considered that it took a brutal kind of
      man to do such work. For myself I felt certain that, though I got the
      upper-hand of a fellow who had tried to murder me, I should never have the
      callousness to return the compliment. The thought of shedding blood was
      nauseating.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was partly to escape from this atmosphere of tension that we left
      London, and set out on a motor-trip through England. This trip had figured
      largely in our original plans before there had been any thought of war. We
      wanted to re-visit the old places that had been the scenes of our
      family-life and childhood. Months before sailing out of Quebec we had
      studied guidebooks, mapping out routes and hotels. With about half a ton
      of gasolene on the roof to guard against contingencies, we started.
    </p>
    <p>
      Everywhere we went, from Cornwall to the North, men were training and
      marching. All the bridges and reservoirs were guarded. Every tiniest
      village had its recruiting posters for Kitchener's Army. It was a trip
      utterly different from the one we had expected.
    </p>
    <p>
      At Stratford in the tap-room of Shakespeare's favourite tavern I met an
      exceptional person&mdash;a man who was afraid, and had the courage to
      speak the truth as millions at that time felt it. An American was present&mdash;a
      vast and fleshy man: a transatlantic version of Falstaff. He had just
      escaped from Paris and was giving us an account of how he had hired a car,
      had driven as near the fighting-line as he could get and had seen the
      wounded coming out. He had risked the driver's life and expended large
      sums of money merely to gratify his curiosity. He mopped his brow and told
      us that he had aged ten years&mdash;folks in Philadelphia would hardly
      know him; but it was all worth it. The details which he embroidered and
      dwelt upon were ghastly. He was particularly impressed with having seen a
      man with his nose off. His description held us horrified and spell-bound.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the midst of his oratory an officer entered, bringing with him five
      nervous young fellows. They were self-conscious, excited, over-wrought and
      belonged to the class of the lawyer's clerk. The officer had evidently
      been working them up to the point of enlistment, and hoped to complete the
      job that evening over a sociable glass. As his audience swelled, the fat
      man from Philadelphia grew exceedingly vivid. When appealed to by the
      recruiting officer, he confirmed the opinion that every Englishman of
      fighting age should be in France; that's where the boys of America would
      be if their country were in the same predicament. Four out of the five
      intended victims applauded this sentiment&mdash;they applauded too
      boisterously for complete sincerity, because they felt that they could do
      no less. The fifth, a scholarly, pale-faced fellow, drew attention to
      himself by his silence.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;You're going to join, too, aren't you?&rdquo; the recruiting officer asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      The pale-faced man swallowed. There was no doubt that he was scared. The
      American's morbid details had been enough to frighten anybody. He was so
      frightened that he had the pluck to tell the truth.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;I'd like to,&rdquo; he hesitated, &ldquo;but&mdash;&mdash;. I've got an imagination.
      I should see things as twice as horrible. I should live through every
      beastliness before it occurred. When it did happen, I should turn coward.
      I should run away, and you'd shoot me as a deserter. I'd like&mdash;not
      yet, I can't.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      He was the bravest man in the tap-room that night. If he's still alive, he
      probably wears decorations. He was afraid, just as every one else was
      afraid; but he wasn't sufficiently a coward to lie about his terror. His
      voice was the voice of millions at that hour.
    </p>
    <p>
      A day came when England's jeopardy was brought home to her. I don't
      remember the date, but I remember it was a Sabbath. We had pulled up
      before a village post office to get the news; it was pasted behind the
      window against the glass. We read, &ldquo;<i>Boulogne has fallen</i>.&rdquo; The news
      was false; but it wasn't contradicted till next day. Meanwhile, in that
      quiet village, over and above the purring of the engine, we heard the beat
      of Death's wings across the Channel&mdash;a gigantic vulture approaching
      which would pick clean of vileness the bones of both the actually and the
      spiritually dead. I knew then for certain that it was only a matter of
      time till I, too, should be out there among the carnage, &ldquo;somewhere in
      France.&rdquo; I felt like a rabbit in the last of the standing corn, when a
      field is in the harvesting. There was no escape&mdash;I could hear the
      scythes of an inexorable duty cutting closer.
    </p>
    <p>
      After about six weeks in England, I travelled back to New York with my
      family to complete certain financial obligations and to set about the
      winding up of my affairs. I said nothing to any one as to my purpose. The
      reason for my silence is now obvious: I didn't want to commit myself to
      other people and wished to leave myself a loop-hole for retracting the
      promises I had made my conscience. There were times when my heart seemed
      to stop beating, appalled by the future which I was rapidly approaching.
      My vivid imagination&mdash;which from childhood has been as much a
      hindrance as a help&mdash;made me foresee myself in every situation of
      horror&mdash;gassed, broken, distributed over the landscape. Luckily it
      made me foresee the worst horror&mdash;the ignominy of living perhaps
      fifty years with a self who was dishonoured and had sunk beneath his own
      best standards. Of course there were also moments of exaltation when the
      boy-spirit of adventure loomed large; it seemed splendidly absurd that I
      was going to be a soldier, a companion-in-arms of those lordly chaps who
      had fought at Senlac, sailed with Drake and saved the day for freedom at
      Mons. Whether I was exalted or depressed, a power stronger than myself
      urged me to work feverishly to the end that, at the first opportunity, I
      might lay aside my occupation, with all my civilian obligations
      discharged.
    </p>
    <p>
      When that time came, my first difficulty was in communicating my decision
      to my family; my second, in getting accepted in Canada. I was perhaps more
      ignorant than most people about things military. I had not the slightest
      knowledge as to the functions of the different arms of the service;
      infantry, artillery, engineers, A.S.C.&mdash;they all connoted just as
      much and as little. I had no qualifications. I had never handled
      fire-arms. My solitary useful accomplishment was that I could ride a
      horse. It seemed to me that no man ever was less fitted for the profession
      of killing. I was painfully conscious of self-ridicule whenever I offered
      myself for the job. I offered myself several times and in different
      quarters; when at last I was granted a commission in the Canadian Field
      Artillery it was by pure good-fortune. I didn't even know what guns were
      used and, if informed, shouldn't have had the least idea what an
      eighteen-pounder was. Nevertheless, within seven months I was out in
      France, taking part in an offensive which, up to that time, was the most
      ambitious of the entire war.
    </p>
    <p>
      From New York I went to Kingston in Ontario to present myself for
      training; an officers' class had just started, in which I had been ordered
      to enrol myself. It was the depth of winter&mdash;an unusually hard winter
      even for that part of Canada. My first glimpse of the Tête du Pont
      Barracks was of a square of low buildings, very much like the square of a
      Hudson Bay Fort. The parade ground was ankle-deep in trampled snow and
      mud. A bleak wind was blowing from off the river. Squads of embryo
      officers were being drilled by hoarse-voiced sergeants. The officers
      looked cold, and cowed, and foolish; the sergeants employed ruthlessly the
      age-old army sarcasms and made no effort to disguise their disgust for
      these officers and &ldquo;temporary gentlemen.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      I was directed to an office where a captain sat writing at a desk, while
      an orderly waited rigidly at attention. The captain looked up as I
      entered, took in my spats and velour hat with an impatient glance, and
      continued with his writing. When I got an opportunity I presented my
      letter; he read it through irritably.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Any previous military experience?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;None at all.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Then how d'you expect to pass out with this class? It's been going for
      nearly two weeks already?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Again, as though he had dismissed me from his mind, he returned to his
      writing. From a military standpoint I knew that I was justly a figure of
      naught; but I also felt that he was rubbing it in a trifle hard. I was too
      recent a recruit to have lost my civilian self-respect. At last, after a
      period of embarrassed silence, I asked, &ldquo;What am I to do? To whom do I
      report?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Without looking up he told me to report on the parade ground at six
      o'clock the following morning. When I got back to my hotel, I reflected on
      the chilliness of my reception. I had taken no credit to myself for
      enlisting&mdash;I knew that I ought to have joined months before. But six
      o'clock! I glanced across at the station, where trains were pulling out
      for New York; for a moment I was tempted. But not for long; I couldn't
      trust the hotel people to wake me, so I went out and purchased an alarm
      clock.
    </p>
    <p>
      That night I didn't sleep much. I was up and dressed by five-thirty. I hid
      beneath the shadow of a wall near the barracks and struck matches to look
      at my watch. At ten minutes to six the street was full of unseen, hurrying
      feet which sounded ghostly in the darkness. I followed them into the
      parade-ground. The parade was falling in, rolls were being called by the
      aid of flash-lamps. I caught hold of an officer; for all I knew he might
      have been a General or Colonel. I asked his advice, when I had blundered
      out my story. He laughed and said I had better return to my hotel; the
      class was going to stables and there was no one at that hour to whom I
      could report.
    </p>
    <p>
      The words of the sergeant at the Empire came back to me, &ldquo;And I'll give
      you hell if I get you in my squad.&rdquo; I understood then: this was the first
      attempt of the Army to break my heart&mdash;an attempt often repeated and
      an attempt for which, from my present point of vantage, I am intensely
      grateful. In those days the Canadian Overseas Forces were comprised of
      volunteers; it wasn't sufficient to express a tepid willingness to die for
      your country&mdash;you had to prove yourself determined and eligible for
      death through your power to endure hardship.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I had been medically examined, passed as fit, had donned a uniform
      and commenced my training, I learnt what the enduring of hardship was. No
      experience on active service has equalled the humiliation and severity of
      those first months of soldiering. We were sneered at, cleaned stables,
      groomed horses, rode stripped saddle for twelve miles at the trot,
      attended lectures, studied till past midnight and were up on first parade
      at six o'clock. No previous civilian efficiency or prominence stood us in
      any stead. We started robbed of all importance, and only gained a new
      importance by our power to hang on and to develop a new efficiency as
      soldiers. When men &ldquo;went sick&rdquo; they were labelled scrimshankers and struck
      off the course. It was an offence to let your body interfere with your
      duty; if it tried to, you must ignore it. If a man caught cold in
      Kingston, what would he not catch in the trenches? Very many went down
      under the physical ordeal; of the class that started, I don't think more
      than a third passed. The lukewarm soldier and the pink-tea hero, who
      simply wanted to swank in a uniform, were effectually choked off. It was a
      test of pluck, even more than of strength or intelligence&mdash;the same
      test that a man would be subjected to all the time at the Front. In a word
      it sorted out the fellows who had &ldquo;guts.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Guts&rdquo; isn't a particularly polite word, but I have come increasingly to
      appreciate its splendid significance. The possessor of this much coveted
      quality is the kind of idiot who,
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;When his legs are smitten off
   Will fight upon his stumps.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      The Tommies, whom we were going to command, would be like that; if we
      weren't like it, we wouldn't be any good as officers. This Artillery
      School had a violent way of sifting out a man's moral worth; you hadn't
      much conceit left by the end of it. I had not felt myself so paltry since
      the day when I was left at my first boarding-school in knickerbockers.
    </p>
    <p>
      After one had qualified and been appointed to a battery, there was still
      difficulty in getting to England. I was lucky, and went over early with a
      draft of officers who had been cabled for as reinforcements. I had been in
      England a bare three weeks when my name was posted as due to go to France.
    </p>
    <p>
      How did I feel? Nervous, of course, but also intensely eager. I may have
      been afraid of wounds and death&mdash;I don't remember; I was certainly
      nothing like as afraid as I had been before I wore uniform. My chief fear
      was that I would be afraid and might show it. Like the pale-faced chap in
      the tap-room at Stratford, I had fleeting glimpses of myself being shot as
      a deserter.
    </p>
    <p>
      At this point something happened which at least proved to me that I had
      made moral progress. I'd finished my packing and was doing a last rush
      round, when I caught in large lettering on a newsboard the heading, &ldquo;PEACE
      RUMOURED.&rdquo; Before I realised what had happened I was crying. I was furious
      with disappointment. If the war should end before I got there&mdash;! On
      buying a paper I assured myself that such a disaster was quite improbable.
      I breathed again. Then the reproachful memory came of another occasion
      when I had been scared by a headline, <i>&ldquo;Boulogne Has Fallen.&rdquo;</i> I had
      been scared lest I might be needed at that time; now I was panic-stricken
      lest I might arrive too late. There was a change in me; something
      deep-rooted had happened. I got to thinking about it. On that motor-trip
      through England I had considered myself in the light of a philanthropist,
      who might come to the help of the Allies and might not. Now all I asked
      was to be considered worthy to do my infinitesimal &ldquo;bit.&rdquo; I had lost all
      my old conceits and hallucinations, and had come to respect myself in a
      very humble fashion not for what I was, but for the cause in which I was
      prepared to fight. The knowledge that I belonged to the physically fit
      contributed to this saner sense of pride; before I wore a uniform I had
      had the morbid fear that I might not be up to standard. And then the
      uniform! It was the outward symbol of the lost selfishness and the cleaner
      honour. It hadn't been paid for; it wouldn't be paid for till I had lived
      in the trenches. I was childishly anxious to earn my right to wear it. I
      had said &ldquo;Good-bye&rdquo; to myself, and had been re-born into willing
      sacrifice. I think that was the reason for the difference of spirit in
      which I read the two headlines. We've all gone through the same spiritual
      gradations, we men who have got to the Front. None of us know how to
      express our conversion. All we know is that from being little
      circumscribed egoists, we have swamped our identities in a magnanimous
      crusade. The venture looked fatal at first; but in losing the whole world
      we have gained our own souls.
    </p>
    <p>
      On a beautiful day in late summer I sailed for France. England faded out
      like a dream behind. Through the haze in mid-Channel a hospital ship came
      racing; on her sides were blazoned the scarlet cross. The next time I came
      to England I might travel on that racing ship. The truth sounded like a
      lie. It seemed far more true that I was going on my annual pleasure trip
      to the lazy cities of romance.
    </p>
    <p>
      The port at which we disembarked was cheery and almost normal. One saw a
      lot of khaki mingling with sky-blue tiger-men of France. Apart from that
      one would scarcely have guessed that the greatest war in the world's
      history was raging not more than fifty miles away. I slept the night at a
      comfortable hotel on the quayside. There was no apparent shortage; I got
      everything that I required. Next day I boarded a train which, I was told,
      would carry me to the Front. We puffed along in a leisurely sort of way.
      The engineer seemed to halt whenever he had a mind; no matter where he
      halted, grubby children miraculously appeared and ran along the bank,
      demanding from Monsieur Engleeshman &ldquo;ceegarettes&rdquo; and &ldquo;beescuits.&rdquo; Towards
      evening we pulled up at a little town where we had a most excellent meal.
      No hint of war yet. Night came down and we found that our carriage had no
      lights. It must have been nearing dawn, when I was wakened by the distant
      thunder of guns. I crouched in my corner, cold and cramped, trying to
      visualise the terror of it. I asked myself whether I was afraid. &ldquo;Not of
      Death,&rdquo; I told myself. &ldquo;But of being afraid&mdash;yes, most horribly.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      At five o'clock we halted at a junction, where a troop-train from the
      Front was already at a standstill. Tommies in steel helmets and muddied to
      the eyes were swarming out onto the tracks. They looked terrible men with
      their tanned cheeks and haggard eyes. I felt how impractical I was as I
      watched them&mdash;how ill-suited for campaigning. They were making the
      most of their respite from travelling. Some were building little fires
      between the ties to do their cooking&mdash;their utensils were bayonets
      and old tomato cans; others were collecting water from the exhaust of an
      engine and shaving. I had already tried to purchase food and had failed,
      so I copied their example and set about shaving.
    </p>
    <p>
      Later in the day we passed gangs of Hun prisoners&mdash;clumsy looking
      fellows, with flaxen hair and blue eyes, who seemed to be thanking God
      every minute with smiles that they were out of danger and on our side of
      the line. Late in the afternoon the engine jumped the rails; we were
      advised to wander off to a rest-camp, the direction of which was sketchily
      indicated. We found some Australians with a transport-wagon and persuaded
      them to help us with our baggage. It had been pouring heavily, but the
      clouds had dispersed and a rainbow spanned the sky. I took it for a sign.
    </p>
    <p>
      After trudging about six miles, we arrived at the camp and found that it
      was out of food and that all the tents were occupied. We stretched our
      sleeping-bags on the ground and went to bed supperless. We had had no food
      all day. Next morning we were told that we ought to jump an
      ammunition-lorry, if we wanted to get any further on our journey. Nobody
      seemed to want us particularly, and no one could give us the least
      information as to where our division was. It was another lesson, if that
      were needed, of our total unimportance. While we were waiting on the
      roadside, an Australian brigade of artillery passed by. The men's faces
      were dreary with fatigue; the gunners were dismounted and marched as in a
      trance. The harness was muddy, the steel rusty, the horses lean and
      discouraged. We understood that they were pulling out from an offensive in
      which they had received a bad cutting up. To my overstrained imagination
      it seemed that the men had the vision of death in their eyes.
    </p>
    <p>
      Presently we spotted a lorry-driver who had, what George Robey would call,
      &ldquo;a kind and generous face.&rdquo; We took advantage of him, for once having
      persuaded him to give us a lift, we froze onto him and made him cart us
      about the country all day. We kept him kind and generous, I regret to say,
      by buying him wine at far too many estaminets.
    </p>
    <p>
      Towards evening the thunder of the guns had swelled into an ominous roar.
      We passed through villages disfigured by shell-fire. Civilians became more
      rare and more aged. Cattle disappeared utterly from the landscape; fields
      were furrowed with abandoned trenches, in front of which hung
      entanglements of wire. Mounted orderlies splashed along sullen roads at an
      impatient trot. Here and there we came across improvised bivouacs of
      infantry. Far away against the horizon towards which we travelled, Hun
      flares and rockets were going up. Hopeless stoicism, unutterable
      desolation&mdash;that was my first impression.
    </p>
    <p>
      The landscape was getting increasingly muddy&mdash;it became a sea of mud.
      Despatch-riders on motor-bikes travelled warily, with their feet dragging
      to save themselves from falling. Everything was splashed with filth and
      corruption; one marvelled at the cleanness of the sky. Trees were blasted,
      and seemed to be sinking out of sight in this war-created Slough of
      Despond. We came to the brow of a hill; in the valley was something that I
      recognised. The last time I had seen it was in an etching in a shop window
      in Newark, New Jersey. It was a town, from the midst of whose battered
      ruins a splintered tower soared against the sky. Leaning far out from the
      tower, so that it seemed she must drop, was a statue of the Virgin with
      the Christ in her arms. It was a superstition with the French, I
      remembered, that so long as she did not fall, things would go well with
      the Allies. As we watched, a shell screamed over the gaping roofs and a
      column of smoke went up. Gehenna, being blessed by the infant Jesus&mdash;that
      was what I saw.
    </p>
    <p>
      As we entered the streets, Tommies more polluted than miners crept out
      from the skeletons of houses. They leant listlessly against sagging
      doorways to watch us pass. If we asked for information as to where our
      division was, they shook their heads stupidly, too indifferent with
      weariness to reply. We found the Town Mayor; all that he could tell us was
      that our division wasn't here yet, but was expected any day&mdash;probably
      it was still on the line of march. Our lorry-driver was growing impatient.
      We wrote him out a note which would explain his wanderings, got him to
      deposit us near a Y. M. C. A. tent, and bade him an uncordial &ldquo;Good-bye.&rdquo;
       For the next three nights we slept by our wits and got our food by
      foraging.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was a Headquarters near by whose battalion was in the line. I struck
      up a liaison with its officers, and at times went into the crowded tent,
      which was their mess, to get warm. Runners would come there at all hours
      of the day and night, bringing messages from the Front. They were usually
      well spent. Sometimes they had been gassed; but they all had the
      invincible determination to carry on. After they had delivered their
      message, they would lie down in the mud and go to sleep like dogs. The
      moment the reply was ready, they would lurch to their feet, throwing off
      their weariness, as though it were a thing to be conquered and despised. I
      appreciated now, as never before, the lesson of &ldquo;guts&rdquo; that I had been
      taught at Kingston.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was one officer at Battalion Headquarters who, whenever I entered,
      was always writing, writing, writing. What he was writing I never enquired&mdash;perhaps
      letters to his sweetheart or wife. It didn't matter how long I stayed, he
      never seemed to have the time to look up. He was a Highlander&mdash;a big
      man with a look of fate in his eyes. His hair was black; his face stern,
      and set, and extremely white. I remember once seeing him long after
      midnight through the raised flap of the tent. All his brother officers
      were asleep, huddled like sacks impersonally on the floor. At the table in
      the centre he sat, his head bowed in his hands, the light from the lamp
      spilling over his neck and forehead. He may have been praying. He recalled
      to my mind the famous picture of The Last Sleep of Argyle. From that
      moment I had the premonition that he would not live long. A month later I
      learnt that he had been killed on his next trip into the trenches.
    </p>
    <p>
      After three days of waiting my division arrived and I was attached to a
      battery. I had scarcely had time to make the acquaintance of my new
      companions, when we pulled into my first attack.
    </p>
    <p>
      We hooked in at dawn and set out through a dense white mist. The mist was
      wet and miserable, but excellent for our purpose; it prevented us from
      being spotted by enemy balloons and aeroplanes. We made all the haste that
      was possible; but in places the roads were blocked by other batteries
      moving into new positions. We passed through the town above which the
      Virgin floated with the infant Jesus in her arms. One wondered whether she
      was really holding him out to bless; her attitude might equally have been
      that of one who was flinging him down into the shambles, disgusted with
      this travesty on religion.
    </p>
    <p>
      The other side of the town the ravages of war were far more marked. All
      the way along the roadside were clumps of little crosses, French, English,
      German, planted above the hurried graves of the brave fellows who had
      fallen. Ambulances were picking their way warily, returning with the last
      night's toll of wounded. We saw newly dead men and horses, pulled to one
      side, who had been caught in the darkness by the enemy's harassing fire.
      In places the country had holes the size of quarries, where mines had
      exploded and shells from large calibre guns had detonated. Bedlam was
      raging up front; shells went screaming over us, seeking out victims in the
      back-country. To have been there by oneself would have been most
      disturbing, but the men about me seemed to regard it as perfectly ordinary
      and normal. I steadied myself by their example.
    </p>
    <p>
      We came to a point where our Major was waiting for us, turned out of the
      road, followed him down a grass slope and so into a valley. Here gun-pits
      were in the process of construction. Guns were unhooked and man-handled
      into their positions, and the teams sent back to the wagon-lines. All day
      we worked, both officers and men, with pick and shovel. Towards evening we
      had completed the gun-platforms and made a beginning on the overhead
      cover. We had had no time to prepare sleeping-quarters, so spread our
      sleeping-bags and blankets in the caved-in trenches. About seven o'clock,
      as we were resting, the evening &ldquo;hate&rdquo; commenced. In those days the
      evening &ldquo;hate&rdquo; was a regular habit with the Hun. He knew our country
      better than we did, for he had retired from it. Every evening he used to
      search out all communication trenches and likely battery-positions with
      any quantity of shells. His idea was to rob us of our <i>morale</i>. I
      wish he might have seen how abysmally he failed to do it. Down our narrow
      valley, like a flight of arrows, the shells screamed and whistled. Where
      they struck, the ground looked like Resurrection Day with the dead
      elbowing their way into daylight and forcing back the earth from their
      eyes. There were actually many dead just beneath the surface and, as the
      ground was ploughed up, the smell of corruption became distinctly
      unpleasant. Presently the shells began to go dud; we realised that they
      were gas-shells. A thin, bluish vapour spread throughout the valley and
      breathing became oppressive. Then like stallions, kicking in their stalls,
      the heavy guns on the ridge above us opened. It was fine to hear them
      stamping their defiance; it made one want to get to grips with his
      aggressors. In the brief silences one could hear our chaps laughing. The
      danger seemed to fill them with a wild excitement. Every time a shell came
      near and missed them, they would taunt the unseen Huns for their poor
      gunnery, giving what they considered the necessary corrections: &ldquo;Five
      minutes more left, old Cock. If you'd only drop fifty, you'd get us.&rdquo;
       These men didn't know what fear was&mdash;or, if they did, they kept it to
      themselves. And these were the chaps whom I was to order.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days later my Major told me that I was to be ready at 3:30 next
      morning to accompany him up front to register the guns. In registering
      guns you take a telephonist and linesmen with you. They lay in a line from
      the battery to any point you may select as the best from which to observe
      the enemy's country. This point may be two miles or more in advance of
      your battery. Your battery is always hidden and out of sight, for fear the
      enemy should see the flash of the firing; consequently the officer in
      charge of the battery lays the guns mathematically, but cannot observe the
      effect of his shots. The officer who goes forward can see the target; by
      telephoning back his corrections, he makes himself the eyes of the officer
      at the guns.
    </p>
    <p>
      It had been raining when we crept out of our kennels to go forward. It
      seems unnecessary to state that it had been raining, for it always has
      been raining at the Front. I don't remember what degree of mud we had
      attained. We have a variety of adjectives, and none of them polite, to
      describe each stage. The worst of all is what we call &ldquo;God-Awful Mud.&rdquo; I
      don't think it was as bad as that, but it was bad enough. Everything was
      dim, and clammy, and spectral. At the hour of dawn one isn't at his
      bravest. It was like walking at the bottom of the sea, only things that
      were thrown at you travelled faster. We struck a sloppy road, along which
      ghostly figures passed, with ground sheets flung across their head and
      shoulders, like hooded monks. At a point where scarlet bundles were being
      lifted into ambulances, we branched overland. Here and there from all
      directions, infantry were converging, picking their way in single file to
      reduce their casualties if a shell burst near them. The landscape, the
      people, the early morning&mdash;everything was stealthy and walked with
      muted steps.
    </p>
    <p>
      We entered a trench. Holes were scooped out in the side of it just large
      enough to shelter a man crouching. Each hole contained a sleeping soldier
      who looked as dead as the occupant of a catacomb. Some of the holes had
      been blown in; all you saw of the late occupant was a protruding arm or
      leg. At best there was a horrid similarity between the dead and the
      living. It seemed that the walls of the trenches had been built out of
      corpses, for one recognised the uniforms of French men and Huns. They <i>were</i>
      built out of them, though whether by design or accident it was impossible
      to tell. We came to a group of men, doing some repairing; that part of the
      trench had evidently been strafed last night. They didn't know where they
      were, or how far it was to the front-line. We wandered on, still laying in
      our wire. The Colonel of our Brigade joined us and we waded on together.
    </p>
    <p>
      The enemy shelling was growing more intense, as was always the way on the
      Somme when we were bringing out our wounded. A good many of our trenches
      were directly enfilade; shells burst just behind the parapet, when they
      didn't burst on it. It was at about this point in my breaking-in that I
      received a blow on the head&mdash;and thanked God for the man who invented
      the steel helmet.
    </p>
    <p>
      Things were getting distinctly curious. We hadn't passed any infantry for
      some time. The trenches were becoming each minute more shallow and
      neglected. Suddenly we found ourselves in a narrow furrow which was packed
      with our own dead. They had been there for some time and were partly
      buried. They were sitting up or lying forward in every attitude of agony.
      Some of them clasped their wounds; some of them pointed with their hands.
      Their faces had changed to every colour and glared at us like swollen
      bruises. Their helmets were off; with a pitiful, derisive neatness the
      rain had parted their hair.
    </p>
    <p>
      We had to crouch low because the trench was so shallow. It was difficult
      not to disturb them; the long skirts of our trench-coats brushed against
      their faces.
    </p>
    <p>
      All of a sudden we halted, making ourselves as small as could be. In the
      rapidly thinning mist ahead of us, men were moving. They were
      stretcher-bearers. The odd thing was that they were carrying their wounded
      away from, instead of towards us. Then it flashed on us that they were
      Huns. We had wandered into No Man's Land. Almost at that moment we must
      have been spotted, for shells commenced falling at the end of the trench
      by which we had entered. Spreading out, so as not to attract attention, we
      commenced to crawl towards the other end. Instantly that also was closed
      to us and a curtain of shells started dropping behind us. We were trapped.
      With perfect coolness&mdash;a coolness which, whatever I looked, I did not
      share&mdash;we went down on our hands and knees, wriggling our way through
      the corpses and shell-holes in the direction of where our front-line ought
      to be. After what seemed an age, we got back. Later we registered the
      guns, and one of our officers who had been laying in wire, was killed in
      the process. His death, like everything else, was regarded without emotion
      as being quite ordinary.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the way out, when we had come to a part of our journey where the
      tension was relaxed and we could be less cautious, I saw a signalling
      officer lying asleep under a blackened tree. I called my Major's attention
      to him, saying, &ldquo;Look at that silly ass, sir. He'll get something that he
      doesn't want if he lies there much longer.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      My Major turned his head, and said briefly, &ldquo;Poor chap, he's got it.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Then I saw that his shoulder-blade had burst through his tunic and was
      protruding. He'd been coming out, walking freely and feeling that the
      danger was over, just as we were, when the unlucky shell had caught him.
      &ldquo;His name must have been written on it,&rdquo; our men say when that happens. I
      noticed that he had black boots; since then nothing would persuade me to
      wear black boots in the trenches.
    </p>
    <p>
      This first experience in No Man's Land did away with my last flabby fear&mdash;that,
      if I was afraid, I would show it. One is often afraid. Any soldier who
      asserts the contrary may not be a liar, but he certainly does not speak
      the truth. Physical fear is too deeply rooted to be overcome by any amount
      of training; it remains, then, to train a man in spiritual pride, so that
      when he fears, nobody knows it. Cowardice is contagious. It has been said
      that no battalion is braver than its least brave member. Military courage
      is, therefore, a form of unselfishness; it is practised that it may save
      weaker men's lives and uphold their honour. The worst thing you can say of
      a man at the Front is, &ldquo;He doesn't play the game.&rdquo; That doesn't of
      necessity mean that he fails to do his duty; what it means is that he
      fails to do a little bit more than his duty.
    </p>
    <p>
      When a man plays the game, he does things which it requires a braver man
      than himself to accomplish; he never knows when he's done; he acknowledges
      no limit to his cheerfulness and strength; whatever his rank, he holds his
      life less valuable than that of the humblest; he laughs at danger not
      because he does not dread it, but because he has learnt that there are
      ailments more terrible and less curable than death.
    </p>
    <p>
      The men in the ranks taught me whatever I know about playing the game. I
      learnt from their example. In acknowledging this, I own up to the new
      equality, based on heroic values, which this war has established. The only
      man who counts &ldquo;out there&rdquo; is the man who is sufficiently self-effacing to
      show courage. The chaps who haven't done it are the exceptions.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the start of the war there were a good many persons whom we were apt to
      think of as common and unclean. But social distinctions are a wash-out in
      the trenches. We have seen St. Peter's vision, and have heard the voice,
      &ldquo;What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Until I became a part of the war, I was a doubter of nobility in others
      and a sceptic as regards myself. The growth of my personal vision was
      complete when I recognised that the capacity of heroism is latent in
      everybody, and only awaits the bigness of the opportunity to call it out.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
    </h2>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
   We were too proud to live for years
   When our poor death could dry the tears
   Of little children yet unborn.
   It scarcely mattered that at morn,
   When manhood's hope was at its height,
   We stopped a bullet in mid-flight.
   It did not trouble us to lie
   Forgotten 'neath the forgetting sky.
   So long Sleep was our only cure
   That when Death piped of rest made sure,
   We cast our fleshly crutches down,
   Laughing like boys in Hamelin Town.
   And this we did while loving life,
   Yet loving more than home or wife
   The kindness of a world set free
   For countless children yet to be.
</pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      III. GOD AS WE SEE HIM
    </h2>
    <p>
      For some time before I was wounded, we had been in very hot places. We
      could scarcely expect them to be otherwise, for we had put on show after
      show. A &ldquo;show&rdquo; in our language, I should explain, has nothing in common
      with a theatrical performance, though it does not lack drama. We make the
      term apply to any method of irritating the Hun, from a trench-raid to a
      big offensive. The Hun was decidedly annoyed. He had very good reason. We
      were occupying the dug-outs which he had spent two years in building with
      French civilian labour. His U-boat threats had failed. He had offered us
      the olive-branch, and his peace terms had been rejected with a peal of
      guns all along the Western Front. He had shown his disapproval of us by
      paying particular attention to our batteries; as a consequence our
      shell-dressings were all used up, having gone out with the gentlemen on
      stretchers who were contemplating a vacation in Blighty. We couldn't get
      enough to re-place them. There was a hitch somewhere. The demand for
      shell-dressings exceeded the supply. So I got on my horse one Sunday and,
      with my groom accompanying me, rode into the back-country to see if I
      couldn't pick some up at various Field Dressing Stations and Collecting
      Points.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the course of my wanderings I came to a cathedral city. It was a city
      which was and still is beautiful, despite the constant bombardments. The
      Huns had just finished hurling a few more tons of explosives into it as I
      and my groom entered. The streets were deserted; it might have been a city
      of the dead. There was no sound, except the ringing iron of our horses'
      shoes on the cobble pavement. Here and there we came to what looked like a
      barricade which barred our progress; actually it was the piled-up walls
      and rubbish of buildings which had collapsed. From cellars, now and then,
      faces of women, children and ancient men peered out&mdash;they were sharp
      and pointed like rats. One's imagination went back five hundred years&mdash;everything
      seemed mediaeval, short-lived and brutal. This might have been Limoges
      after the Black Prince had finished massacring its citizens; or it might
      have been Paris, when the wolves came down and François Villon tried to
      find a lodging for the night.
    </p>
    <p>
      I turned up through narrow alleys where grass was growing and found
      myself, almost by accident, in a garden. It was a green and spacious
      garden, with fifteen-foot walls about it and flowers which scattered
      themselves broadcast in neglected riot. We dismounted and tied our horses.
      Wandering along its paths, we came across little summer-houses, statues,
      fountains and then, without any hindrance, found ourselves in the nave of
      a fine cathedral which was roofed only by the sky. Two years of the Huns
      had made it as much a ruin as Tintern Abbey. Here, too, the flowers had
      intruded. They grew between graves in the pavement and scrambled up the
      walls, wherever they could find a foothold. At the far end of this stretch
      of destruction stood the high altar, totally untouched by the hurricane of
      shell-fire. The saints were perched in their niches, composed and stately.
      The Christ looked down from His cross, as he had done for centuries,
      sweeping the length of splendid architecture with sad eyes. It seemed a
      miracle that the altar had been spared, when everything else had fallen. A
      reason is given for its escape. Every Sabbath since the start of the war,
      no matter how severe the bombardment, service has been held there. The
      thin-faced women, rat-faced children and ancient men have crept out from
      their cellars and gathered about the priest; the lamp has been lit, the
      Host uplifted. The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands
      shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So
      far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol&mdash;that in the heart of
      the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet
      place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun
      will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness
      out. From the polluted trenches of Vimy the poppies spring up, blazoning
      abroad in vivid scarlet the heroism of our lads' willing sacrifice. All
      this April, high above the shouting of our guns, the larks sang joyously.
      The scarlet of the poppies, the song of the larks, the lamp shining on the
      altar are only external signs of the unconquerable, happy religion which
      lies hidden in the hearts of our men. Their religion is the religion of
      heroism, which they have learnt in the glory of the trenches.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was a line from William Morris's <i>Earthly Paradise</i> which used
      to haunt me, especially in the early days when I was first experiencing
      what war really meant. Since returning for a brief space to where books
      are accessible, I have looked up the quotation. It reads as follows:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
   I cannot ease the burden of your fears
   Or make quick-coming death a little thing.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      It is the last line that makes me smile rather quietly, &ldquo;Or make
      quick-coming death a little thing.&rdquo; I smile because the souls who wear
      khaki have learnt to do just that. Morris goes on to say that all he can
      do to make people happy is to tell them deathless stories about heroes who
      have passed into the world of the imagination, and, because of that, are
      immune from death. He calls himself &ldquo;the idle singer of an empty day.&rdquo; How
      typical he is of the days before the war when people had only pin-pricks
      to endure, and, consequently, didn't exert themselves to be brave! A big
      sacrifice, which bankrupts one's life, is always more bearable than the
      little inevitable annoyances of sickness, disappointment and dying in a
      bed. It's easier for Christ to go to Calvary than for an on-looker to lose
      a night's sleep in the garden. When the world went well with us before the
      war, we were doubters. Nearly all the fiction of the past fifteen years is
      a proof of that&mdash;it records our fear of failure, sex, old age and
      particularly of a God who refuses to explain Himself. Now, when we have
      thrust the world, affections, life itself behind us and gaze hourly into
      the eyes of Death, belief comes as simply and clearly as it did when we
      were children. Curious and extraordinary! The burden of our fears has
      slipped from our shoulders in our attempt to do something for others; the
      unbelievable and long coveted miracle has happened&mdash;at last to every
      soul who has grasped his chance of heroism quick-coming death has become a
      fifth-rate calamity.
    </p>
    <p>
      In saying this I do not mean to glorify war; war can never be anything but
      beastly and damnable. It dates back to the jungle. But there are two kinds
      of war. There's the kind that a highwayman wages, when he pounces from the
      bushes and assaults a defenceless woman; there's the kind you wage when
      you go to her rescue. The highwayman can't expect to come out of the fight
      with a loftier morality&mdash;you can. Our chaps never wanted to fight.
      They hate fighting; it's that hatred of the thing they are compelled to do
      that makes them so terrible. The last thought to enter their heads four
      years ago was that to-day they would be in khaki. They had never been
      trained to the use of arms; a good many of them conceived of themselves as
      cowards. They entered the war to defend rather than to destroy. They
      literally put behind them houses, brethren, sisters, father, mother, wife,
      children, lands for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, though they would be the
      last to express themselves in that fashion.
    </p>
    <p>
      At a cross-road at the bottom of a hill, on the way to a gun-position we
      once had, stood a Calvary&mdash;one of those wayside altars, so frequently
      met in France, with pollarded trees surrounding it and an image of Christ
      in His agony. Pious peasants on their journey to market or as they worked
      in the fields, had been accustomed to raise their eyes to it and cross
      themselves. It had comforted them with the knowledge of protection. The
      road leading back from it and up the hill was gleaming white&mdash;a
      direct enfilade for the Hun, and always under observation. He kept guns
      trained on it; at odd intervals, any hour during the day or night, he
      would sweep it with shell-fire. The woods in the vicinity were blasted and
      blackened. It was the season for leaves and flowers, but there was no
      greenness. Whatever of vegetation had not been uprooted and buried, had
      been poisoned by gas. The atmosphere was vile with the odour of decaying
      flesh. In the early morning, if you passed by the Calvary, there was
      always some fresh tragedy. The newly dead lay sprawled out against its
      steps, as though they had dragged themselves there in their last moments.
      If you looked along the road, all the glazed eyes seemed to stare towards
      it. &ldquo;Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy Kingdom,&rdquo; they seemed to
      say. The wooden Christ gazed down on them from His cross, with a suffering
      which two thousand years ago he had shared. The terrible pity of His
      silence seemed to be telling them that they had become one with Him in
      their final sacrifice. They hadn't lived His life&mdash;far from it;
      unknowingly they had died His death. That's a part of the glory of the
      trenches, that a man who has not been good, can crucify himself and hang
      beside Christ in the end. One wonders in what pleasant places those weary
      souls find rest.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was a second Calvary&mdash;a heap of ruins. Nothing of the altar or
      trees, by which it had been surrounded, was left. The first time I passed
      it, I saw a foot protruding. The man might be wounded; I climbed up to
      examine and pulled aside the debris. Beneath it I found, like that of one
      three weeks dead, the naked body of the Christ. The exploding shell had
      wrenched it from its cross. Aslant the face, with gratuitous blasphemy,
      the crown of thorns was tilted.
    </p>
    <p>
      These two Calvaries picture for me the part that Christ is playing in the
      present war. He survives in the noble self-effacement of the men. He is
      re-crucified in the defilements that are wrought upon their bodies.
    </p>
    <p>
      God as we see Him! And do we see Him? I think so, but not always
      consciously. He moves among us in the forms of our brother men. We see him
      most evidently when danger is most threatening and courage is at its
      highest. We don't often recognise Him out loud. Our chaps don't assert
      that they're His fellow-campaigners. They're too humble-minded and
      inarticulate for that. They're where they are because they want to do
      their &ldquo;bit&rdquo;&mdash;their duty. A carefully disguised instinct of honour
      brought them there. &ldquo;Doing their bit&rdquo; in Bible language means, laying down
      their lives for their friends. After all they're not so far from Nazareth.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;<i>Doing their bit</i>!&rdquo; That covers everything. Here's an example of how
      God walks among us. In one of our attacks on the Somme, all the observers
      up forward were uncertain as to what had happened. We didn't know whether
      our infantry had captured their objective, failed, or gone beyond it. The
      battlefield, as far as eye could reach, was a bath of mud. It is extremely
      easy in the excitement of an offensive, when all landmarks are blotted
      out, for our storming parties to lose their direction. If this happens, a
      number of dangers may result. A battalion may find itself &ldquo;up in the air,&rdquo;
       which means that it has failed to connect with the battalions on its right
      and left; its flanks are then exposed to the enemy. It may advance too
      far, and start digging itself in at a point where it was previously
      arranged that our artillery should place their protective wall of fire.
      We, being up forward as artillery observers, are the eyes of the army. It
      is our business to watch for such contingencies, to keep in touch with the
      situation as it progresses and to send our information back as quickly as
      possible. We were peering through our glasses from our point of vantage
      when, far away in the thickest of the battle-smoke, we saw a white flag
      wagging, sending back messages. The flag-wagging was repeated desperately;
      it was evident that no one had replied, and probable that no one had
      picked up the messages. A signaller who was with us, read the language for
      us. A company of infantry had advanced too far; they were most of them
      wounded, very many of them dead, and they were in danger of being
      surrounded. They asked for our artillery to place a curtain of fire in
      front of them, and for reinforcements to be sent up.
    </p>
    <p>
      We at once 'phoned the orders through to our artillery and notified the
      infantry headquarters of the division that was holding that front. But it
      was necessary to let those chaps know that we were aware of their
      predicament. They'd hang on if they knew that; otherwise&mdash;&mdash;.
    </p>
    <p>
      Without orders our signaller was getting his flags ready. If he hopped out
      of the trench onto the parapet, he didn't stand a fifty-fifty chance. The
      Hun was familiar with our observation station and strafed it with
      persistent regularity.
    </p>
    <p>
      The signaller turned to the senior officer present, &ldquo;What will I send
      them, sir?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;Tell them their messages have been received and that help is coming.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Out the chap scrambled, a flag in either hand&mdash;he was nothing but a
      boy. He ran crouching like a rabbit to a hump of mud where his figure
      would show up against the sky. His flags commenced wagging, &ldquo;Messages
      received. Help coming.&rdquo; They didn't see him at first. He had to repeat the
      words. We watched him breathlessly. We knew what would happen; at last it
      happened. A Hun observer had spotted him and flashed the target back to
      his guns. All about him the mud commenced to leap and bubble. He went on
      signalling the good word to those stranded men up front, &ldquo;Messages
      received. Help coming.&rdquo; At last they'd seen him. They were signaling, &ldquo;O.
      K.&rdquo; It was at that moment that a whizz-bang lifted him off his feet and
      landed him all of a huddle. <i>His &ldquo;bit!&rdquo;</i> It was what he'd volunteered
      to do, when he came from Canada. The signalled &ldquo;O. K.&rdquo; in the battlesmoke
      was like a testimony to his character.
    </p>
    <p>
      That's the kind of peep at God we get on the Western Front. It isn't a sad
      peep, either. When men die for something worth while death loses all its
      terror. It's petering out in bed from sickness or old age that's so
      horrifying. Many a man, whose cowardice is at loggerheads with his sense
      of duty, comes to the Front as a non-combatant; he compromises with his
      conscience and takes a bomb-proof job in some service whose place is well
      behind the lines. He doesn't stop there long, if he's a decent sort.
      Having learnt more than ever he guessed before about the brutal things
      that shell-fire can do to you, he transfers into a fighting unit. Why?
      Because danger doesn't appal; it allures. It holds a challenge. It stings
      one's pride. It urges one to seek out ascending scales of risk, just to
      prove to himself that he isn't flabby. The safe job is the only job for
      which there's no competition in fighting units. You have to persuade men
      to be grooms, or cooks, or batmen. If you're seeking volunteers for a
      chance at annihilation, you have to cast lots to avoid the offence of
      rejecting. All of this is inexplicable to civilians. I've heard them call
      the men at the Front &ldquo;spiritual geniuses&rdquo;&mdash;which sounds splendid, but
      means nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      If civilian philosophers fail to explain us, we can explain them. In their
      world they are the centre of their universe. They look inward, instead of
      outward. The sun rises and sets to minister to their particular happiness.
      If they should die, the stars would vanish. We understand; a few months
      ago we, too, were like that. What makes us reckless of death is our
      intense gratitude that we have altered. We want to prove to ourselves in
      excess how utterly we are changed from what we were. In his secret heart
      the egotist is a self-despiser. Can you imagine what a difference it works
      in a man after years of self-contempt, at least for one brief moment to
      approve of himself? Ever since we can remember, we were chained to the
      prison-house of our bodies; we lived to feed our bodies, to clothe our
      bodies, to preserve our bodies, to minister to their passions. Now we know
      that our bodies are mere flimsy shells, in which our souls are paramount.
      We can fling them aside any minute; they become ignoble the moment the
      soul has departed. We have proof. Often at zero hour we have seen whole
      populations of cities go over the top and vanish, leaving behind them
      their bloody rags. We should go mad if we did not believe in immortality.
      We know that the physical is not the essential part. How better can a man
      shake off his flesh than at the hour when his spirit is most shining? The
      exact day when he dies does not matter&mdash;to-morrow or fifty years
      hence. The vital concern is not <i>when</i>, but <i>how</i>. The civilian
      philosopher considers what we've lost. He forgets that it could never have
      been ours for long. In many cases it was misused and scarcely worth having
      while it lasted. Some of us were too weak to use it well. We might use it
      better now. We turn from such thoughts and reckon up our gains. On the
      debit side we place ourselves as we were. We probably caught a train every
      morning&mdash;the same train, we went to a business where we sat at a
      desk. Neither the business nor the desk ever altered. We received the same
      strafing from the same employer; or, if we were the employer, we
      administered the same strafing. We only did these things that we might eat
      bread; our dreams were all selfish&mdash;of more clothes, more respect,
      more food, bigger houses. The least part of the day we devoted to the
      people and the things we really cared for. And the people we loved&mdash;we
      weren't always nice to them. On the credit side we place ourselves as we
      are&mdash;doing a man's job, doing it for some one else, and unafraid to
      meet God.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before the war the word &ldquo;ideals&rdquo; had grown out-of-date and priggish&mdash;we
      had substituted for it the more robust word &ldquo;ambitions.&rdquo; Today ideals have
      come back to their place in our vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever
      had ambitions, but at this moment men are drowning for ideals in the mud
      of Flanders.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nevertheless, it is true; it isn't natural to be brave. How, then, have
      multitudes of men acquired this sudden knack of courage? They have been
      educated by the greatness of the occasion; when big sacrifices have been
      demanded, men have never been found lacking. And they have acquired it
      through discipline and training.
    </p>
    <p>
      When you have subjected yourself to discipline, you cease to think of
      yourself; <i>you</i> are not <i>you</i>, but a part of a company of men.
      If you don't do your duty, you throw the whole machine out. You soon learn
      the hard lesson that every man's life and every man's service belong to
      other people. Of this the organisation of an army is a vivid illustration.
      Take the infantry, for instance. They can't fight by themselves; they're
      dependent on the support of the artillery. The artillery, in their turn,
      would be terribly crippled, were it not for the gallantry of the air
      service. If the infantry collapse, the guns have to go back; if the
      infantry advance, the guns have to be pulled forward. This close
      interdependence of service on service, division on division, battalion on
      battery, follows right down through the army till it reaches the
      individual, so that each man feels that the day will be lost if he fails.
      His imagination becomes intrigued by the immensity of the stakes for which
      he plays. Any physical calamity which may happen to himself becomes
      trifling when compared with the disgrace he would bring upon his regiment
      if he were not courageous.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few months ago I was handing over a battery-position in a fairly warm
      place. The major, who came up to take over from me, brought with him a
      subaltern and just enough men to run the guns. Within half-an-hour of
      their arrival, a stray shell came over and caught the subaltern and five
      of the gun-detachment. It was plain at once that the subaltern was dying&mdash;his
      name must have been written on the shell, as we say in France. We got a
      stretcher and made all haste to rush him out to a dressing-station. Just
      as he was leaving, he asked to speak with his major. &ldquo;I'm so sorry, sir; I
      didn't mean to get wounded,&rdquo; he whispered. The last word he sent back from
      the dressing-station where he died, was, &ldquo;Tell the major, I didn't mean to
      do it.&rdquo; That's discipline. He didn't think of himself; all he thought of
      was that his major would be left short-handed.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here's another story, illustrating how mercilessly discipline can restore
      a man to his higher self. Last spring, the night before an attack, a man
      was brought into a battalion headquarters dug-out, under arrest. The
      adjutant and Colonel were busy attending to the last details of their
      preparations. The adjutant looked up irritably,
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The N. C. O. of the guard answered, &ldquo;We found this man, sir, in a
      communication trench. His company has been in the front-line two hours. He
      was sitting down, with his equipment thrown away, and evidently had no
      intention of going up.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The adjutant glanced coldly at the prisoner. &ldquo;What have you to say for
      yourself?&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The man was ghastly white and shaking like an aspen. &ldquo;Sir, I'm not the man
      I was since I saw my best friend, Jimmie, with his head blown off and
      lying in his hands. It's kind of got me. I can't face up to it.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The adjutant was silent for a few seconds; then he said, &ldquo;You know you
      have a double choice. You can either be shot up there, doing your duty, or
      behind the lines as a coward. It's for you to choose. I don't care.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      The interview was ended. He turned again to the Colonel. The man slowly
      straightened himself, saluted like a soldier and marched out alone to the
      Front. That's what discipline does for a man who's going back on himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      One of the big influences that helps to keep a soldier's soul sanitary is
      what is known in the British Army as &ldquo;spit and polish.&rdquo; Directly we pull
      out for a rest, we start to work burnishing and washing. The chaps may
      have shown the most brilliant courage and self-sacrificing endurance, it
      counts for nothing if they're untidy. The first morning, no matter what
      are the weather conditions, we hold an inspection; every man has to show
      up with his chin shaved, hair cut, leather polished and buttons shining.
      If he doesn't he gets hell.
    </p>
    <p>
      There's a lot in it. You bring a man out from a tight corner where he's
      been in hourly contact with death; he's apt to think, &ldquo;What's the use of
      taking pride in myself. I'm likely to be 'done in' any day. It'll be all
      the same when I'm dead.&rdquo; But if he doesn't keep clean in his body, he
      won't keep clean in his mind. The man who has his buttons shining brightly
      and his leather polished, is usually the man who is brightly polished
      inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from
      seeing his pals killed, and to carry on as though nothing abnormal had
      happened. It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which
      makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically. If
      you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy&mdash;and
      tragedy always has its humorous aspect&mdash;that helps. The songs which
      have been inspired by the trenches are examples of this tendency.
    </p>
    <p>
      The last thing you find anybody singing &ldquo;out there&rdquo; is something
      patriotic; the last thing you find anybody reading is Rupert Brooke's
      poems. When men sing among the shell-holes they prefer a song which
      belittles their own heroism. Please picture to yourself a company of
      mud-stained scarecrows in steel-helmets, plodding their way under
      intermittent shelling through a battered trench, whistling and humming the
      following splendid sentiments from <i>The Plea of The Conscientious
      Objector</i>:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
&ldquo;Send us the Army and the Navy. Send us the rank and file.
 Send us the grand old Territorials&mdash;they'll face the danger with a smile.
 Where are the boys of the Old Brigade who made old England free?
 You may send my mother, my sister or my brother,
 But for Gawd's sake don't send me.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      They leave off whistling and humming to shout the last line. A shell falls
      near them&mdash;then another, then another. They crouch for a minute
      against the sticky walls to escape the flying spray of death. Then they
      plod onward again through the mud whistling and humming, &ldquo;But for Gawd's
      sake don't send me.&rdquo; They're probably a carrying party, taking up the
      rations to their pals. It's quite likely they'll have a bad time to-night&mdash;there's
      the smell of gas in the air. Good luck to them. They disappear round the
      next traverse.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our men sing many mad burlesques on their own splendour&mdash;parodies on
      their daily fineness. Here's a last example&mdash;a take-off on <i>&ldquo;A
      Little Bit of Heaven</i>:&rdquo;
     </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
  &ldquo;Oh a little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day
   And it landed on a soldier in a field not far away;
   But when they went to find him he was bust beyond repair,
   So they pulled his legs and arms off and they left him lying there.
   Then they buried him in Flanders just to make the new crops grow.
   He'll make the best manure, they say, and sure they ought to know.
   And they put a little cross up which bore his name so grand,
   On the day he took his farewell for a better Promised Land.&rdquo;
 </pre>
    <p>
      One learns to laugh&mdash;one has to&mdash;just as he has to learn to
      believe in immortality. The Front affords plenty of occasions for humour
      if a man has only learnt to laugh at himself. I had been sent forward to
      report at a battalion headquarters as liaison officer for an attack. The
      headquarters were in a captured dug-out somewhere under a ruined house.
      Just as I got there and was searching among the fallen walls for an
      entrance, the Hun barrage came down. It was like the Yellowstone Park when
      all the geysers are angry at the same time. Roofs, beams, chips of stone
      commenced to fly in every direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small
      dump of bombs was struck by a shell and started to explode behind me. The
      blast of the explosion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen stairs of
      the dug-out I had been trying to discover. I landed on all fours in a
      place full of darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't know how long I
      lay there. Something was squirming under me. A voice said plaintively, &ldquo;I
      don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm the adjutant.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      It's a queer country, that place we call &ldquo;out there.&rdquo; You approach our
      front-line, as it is to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles of
      battlefields. Nothing in the way of habitation is left. Everything has
      been beaten into pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire. First you come to a
      metropolis of horse-lines, which makes you think that a mammoth circus has
      arrived. Then you come to plank roads and little light railways, running
      out like veins across the mud. Far away there's a ridge and a row of
      charred trees, which stand out gloomily etched against the sky. The sky is
      grey and damp and sickly; fleecy balls of smoke burst against it&mdash;shrapnel.
      You wonder whether they've caught anybody. Overhead you hear the purr of
      engines&mdash;a flight of aeroplanes breasting the clouds. Behind you
      observation balloons hang stationary, like gigantic tethered sausages.
    </p>
    <p>
      If you're riding, you dismount before you reach the ridge and send your
      horse back; the Hun country is in sight on the other side. You creep up
      cautiously, taking careful note of where the shells are falling. There's
      nothing to be gained by walking into a barrage; you make up your mind to
      wait. The rate of fire has slackened; you make a dash for it. From the
      ridge there's a pathway which runs down through the blackened wood; two
      men going alone are not likely to be spotted. Not likely, but&mdash;.
      There's an old cement Hun gun-pit to the right; you take cover in it.
      &ldquo;Pretty wide awake,&rdquo; you say to your companion, &ldquo;to have picked us out as
      quickly as that.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      From this sheltered hiding you have time to gaze about you. The roof of
      the gun-pit is smashed in at one corner. Our heavies did that when the Hun
      held the ridge. It was good shooting. A perfect warren of tunnels and
      dug-outs leads off in every direction. They were built by the forced
      labour of captive French civilians. We have found requests from them
      scrawled in pencil on the boards: &ldquo;I, Jean Ribeau, was alive and well on
      May 12th, 1915. If this meets the eye of a friend, I beg that he will
      inform my wife,&rdquo; etc.; after which follows the wife's address. These
      underground fortifications proved as much a snare as a protection to our
      enemies. I smile to remember how after our infantry had advanced three
      miles, they captured a Hun major busily shaving himself in his dug-out,
      quite unaware that anything unusual was happening. He was very angry
      because he had been calling in vain for his man to bring his hot water.
      When he heard the footsteps of our infantry on the stairs, he thought it
      was his servant and started strafing. He got the surprise of his venerable
      life when he saw the khaki.
    </p>
    <p>
      From the gun-pit the hill slants steeply to the plain. It was once finely
      wooded. Now the trees lie thick as corpses where an attack has failed,
      scythed down by bursting shells. From the foot of the hill the plain
      spreads out, a sea of furrowed slime and craters. It's difficult to pick
      out trenches. Nothing is moving. It's hard to believe that anything can
      live down there. Suddenly, as though a gigantic egg-beater were at work,
      the mud is thrashed and tormented. Smoke drifts across the area that is
      being strafed; through the smoke the stakes and wire hurtle. If you hadn't
      been in flurries of that sort yourself, you'd think that no one could
      exist through it. It's ended now; once again the country lies dead and
      breathless in a kind of horrible suspense. Suspense! Yes, that's the word.
    </p>
    <p>
      Beyond the mud, in the far cool distance is a green untroubled country.
      The Huns live there. That's the worst of doing all the attacking; we live
      on the recent battlefields we have won, whereas the enemy retreats into
      untouched cleanness. One can see church steeples peeping above woods,
      chateaus gleaming, and stretches of shining river. It looks innocent and
      kindly, but from the depth of its greenness invisible eyes peer out. Do
      you make one unwary movement, and over comes a flock of shells.
    </p>
    <p>
      At night from out this swamp of vileness a phantom city floats up; it is
      composed of the white Very lights and multi-coloured flares which the Hun
      employs to protect his front-line from our patrols. For brief spells No
      Man's Land becomes brilliant as day. Many of his flares are prearranged
      signals, meaning that his artillery is shooting short or calling for an
      S.O.S. The combination of lights which mean these things are changed with
      great frequency, lest we should guess. The on-looker, with a long night of
      observing before him, becomes imaginative and weaves out for the dancing
      lights a kind of Shell-Hole Nights' Entertainment. The phantom city over
      there is London, New York, Paris, according to his fancy. He's going out
      to dinner with his girl. All those flares are arc-lamps along boulevards;
      that last white rocket that went flaming across the sky, was the faery
      taxi which is to speed him on his happy errand. It isn't so, one has only
      to remember.
    </p>
    <p>
      We were in the Somme for several months. The mud was up to our knees
      almost all the time. We were perishingly cold and very rarely dry. There
      was no natural cover. When we went up forward to observe, we would stand
      in water to our knees for twenty-four hours rather than go into the
      dug-outs; they were so full of vermin and battened flies. Wounded and
      strayed men often drowned on their journey back from the front-line. Many
      of the dead never got buried; lives couldn't be risked in carrying them
      out. We were so weary that the sight of those who rested for ever, only
      stirred in us a quiet envy. Our emotions were too exhausted for hatred&mdash;they
      usually are, unless some new Hunnishness has roused them. When we're
      having a bad time, we glance across No Man's Land and say, &ldquo;Poor old
      Fritzie, he's getting the worst of it.&rdquo; That thought helps.
    </p>
    <p>
      An attack is a relaxation from the interminable monotony. It means that we
      shall exchange the old mud, in which we have been living, for new mud
      which may be better. Months of work and preparation have led up to it;
      then one morning at dawn, in an intense silence we wait with our eyes
      glued on our watches for the exact second which is zero hour. All of a
      sudden our guns open up, joyously as a peal of bells. It's like Judgment
      Day. A wild excitement quickens the heart. Every privation was worth this
      moment. You wonder where you'll be by night-fall&mdash;over there, in the
      Hun support trenches, or in a green world which you used to sing about on
      Sundays. You don't much care, so long as you've completed your job. &ldquo;We're
      well away,&rdquo; you laugh to the chap next you. The show has commenced.
    </p>
    <p>
      When you have given people every reason you can think of which explains
      the spirit of our men, they still shake their heads in a bewildered
      manner, murmuring, &ldquo;I don't know how you stand it.&rdquo; I'm going to make one
      last attempt at explanation.
    </p>
    <p>
      We stick it out by believing that we're in the right&mdash;to believe
      you're in the right makes a lot of difference. You glance across No Man's
      Land and say, &ldquo;Those blighters are wrong; I'm right.&rdquo; If you believe that
      with all the strength of your soul and mind, you can stand anything. To
      allow yourself to be beaten would be to own that you weren't.
    </p>
    <p>
      To still hold that you're right in the face of armed assertions from the
      Hun that you're wrong, requires pride in your regiment, your division,
      your corps and, most of all, in your own integrity. No one who has not
      worn a uniform can understand what pride in a regiment can do for a man.
      For instance, in France every man wears his divisional patch, which marks
      him. He's jolly proud of his division and wouldn't consciously do anything
      to let it down. If he hears anything said to its credit, he treasures the
      saying up; it's as if he himself had been mentioned in despatches. It was
      rumoured this year that the night before an attack, a certain Imperial
      General called his battalion commanders together. When they were
      assembled, he said, &ldquo;Gentlemen, I have called you together to tell you
      that tomorrow morning you will be confronted by one of the most difficult
      tasks that has ever been allotted to you; you will have to measure up to
      the traditions of the division on our left&mdash;the First Canadian
      Division, which is in my opinion the finest fighting division in France.&rdquo;
       I don't know whether the story is true or not. If the Imperial General
      didn't say it, he ought to have. But because I belong to the First
      Canadian Division, I believe the report true and set store by it. Every
      new man who joins our division hears that story. He feels that he, too,
      has got to be worthy of it. When he's tempted to get the &ldquo;wind-up,&rdquo; he
      glances down at the patch on his arm. It means as much to him as a V. C.;
      so he steadies his nerves, squares his jaws and plays the man.
    </p>
    <p>
      There's believing you're right. There's your sense of pride, and then
      there's something else, without which neither of the other two would help
      you. It seems a mad thing to say with reference to fighting men, but that
      other thing which enables you to meet sacrifice gladly is love. There's a
      song we sing in England, a great favourite which, when it has recounted
      all the things we need to make us good and happy, tops the list with these
      final requisites, &ldquo;A little patience and a lot of love.&rdquo; We need the
      patience&mdash;that goes without saying; but it's the love that helps us
      to die gladly&mdash;love for our cause, our pals, our family, our country.
      Under the disguise of duty one has to do an awful lot of loving at the
      Front. One of the finest examples of the thing I'm driving at, happened
      comparatively recently.
    </p>
    <p>
      In a recent attack the Hun set to work to knock out our artillery. He
      commenced with a heavy shelling of our batteries&mdash;this lasted for
      some hours. He followed it up by clapping down on them a gas-barrage. The
      gunners' only chance of protecting themselves from the deadly fumes was to
      wear their gas-helmets. All of a sudden, just as the gassing of our
      batteries was at its worst, all along our front-line S.O.S. rockets
      commenced to go up. Our infantry, if they weren't actually being attacked,
      were expecting a heavy Hun counter-attack, and were calling on us by the
      quickest means possible to help them.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of a gun-detachment there are two men who cannot do their work accurately
      in gas-helmets&mdash;one of these is the layer and the other is the
      fuse-setter. If the infantry were to be saved, two men out of the
      detachment of each protecting gun must sacrifice themselves. Instantly,
      without waiting for orders, the fuse-setters and layers flung aside their
      helmets. Our guns opened up. The unmasked men lasted about twenty minutes;
      when they had been dragged out of the gun-pits choking or in convulsions,
      two more took their places without a second's hesitation. This went on for
      upwards of two hours. The reason given by the gunners for their splendid,
      calculated devotion to duty was that they weren't going to let their pals
      in the trenches down. You may call their heroism devotion to duty or
      anything you like; the motive that inspired it was love.
    </p>
    <p>
      When men, having done their &ldquo;bit&rdquo; get safely home from the Front and have
      the chance to live among the old affections and enjoyments, the memory of
      the splendid sharing of the trenches calls them back. That memory blots
      out all the tragedy and squalor; they think of their willing comrades in
      sacrifice and cannot rest.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was with a young officer who was probably the most wounded man who ever
      came out of France alive. He had lain for months in hospital between
      sandbags, never allowed to move, he was so fragile. He had had great
      shell-wounds in his legs and stomach; the artery behind his left ear had
      been all but severed. When he was at last well enough to be discharged,
      the doctors had warned him never to play golf or polo, or to take any
      violent form of exercise lest he should do himself a damage. He had
      returned to Canada for a rest and was back in London, trying to get sent
      over again to the Front.
    </p>
    <p>
      We had just come out from the Alhambra. Whistles were being blown shrilly
      for taxis. London theatre-crowds were slipping cosily through the muffled
      darkness&mdash;a man and girl, always a man and a girl. They walked very
      closely; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly the contrast flashed
      across my mind between this bubbling joy of living and the poignant
      silence of huddled forms beneath the same starlight, not a hundred miles
      away in No Man's Land. He must have been seeing the same vision and making
      the same contrast. He pulled on my arm. &ldquo;I've got to go back.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;But you've done your 'bit,'&rdquo; I expostulated. &ldquo;If you do go back and don't
      get hit, you may burst a blood vessel or something, if what the doctors
      told you is true.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      He halted me beneath an arc-light. I could see the earnestness in his
      face. &ldquo;I feel about it this way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;If I'm out there, I'm just one
      more. A lot of chaps out there are jolly tired; if I was there, I'd be
      able to give some chap a rest.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      That was love; for a man, if he told the truth, would say, &ldquo;I hate the
      Front.&rdquo; Yet most of us, if you ask us, &ldquo;Do you want to go back?&rdquo; would
      answer, &ldquo;Yes, as fast as I can.&rdquo; Why? Partly because it's difficult to go
      back, and in difficulty lies a challenge; but mostly because we love the
      chaps. Not any particular chap, but all the fellows out there who are
      laughing and enduring.
    </p>
    <p>
      Last time I met the most wounded man who ever came out of France alive, it
      was my turn to be in hospital. He came to visit me there, and told me that
      he'd been all through the Vimy racket and was again going back.
    </p>
    <p>
      &ldquo;But how did you manage to get into the game again?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;I thought
      the doctors wouldn't pass you.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      He laughed slily. &ldquo;I didn't ask the doctors. If you know the right people,
      these things can always be worked.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      More than half of the bravery at the Front is due to our love of the folks
      we have left behind. We're proud of them; we want to give them reason to
      be proud of us. We want them to share our spirit, and we don't want to let
      them down. The finest reward I've had since I became a soldier was when my
      father, who'd come over from America to spend my ten days' leave with me
      in London, saw me off on my journey back to France. I recalled his despair
      when I had first enlisted, and compared it with what happened now. We were
      at the pier-gates, where we had to part. I said to him, &ldquo;If you knew that
      I was going to die in the next month, would you rather I stayed or went?&rdquo;
       &ldquo;Much rather you went,&rdquo; he answered. Those words made me feel that I was
      the son of a soldier, even if he did wear mufti. One would have to play
      the game pretty low to let a father like that down.
    </p>
    <p>
      When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's
      selfishness that makes a man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a
      dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      I've been supposed to be talking about God As We See Him. I don't know
      whether I have. As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when I was out
      there, whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should have
      replied, &ldquo;Certainly not.&rdquo; Now that I've been out of the fighting for a
      while, I see that there is religion there; a religion which will dominate
      the world when the war is ended&mdash;the religion of heroism. It's a
      religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before I went to the
      Front, prayer was a habit. Out there I lost the habit; what one was doing
      seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might be meeting God at any
      moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all the time, hanging on to a
      spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if He didn't answer me directly I
      rang Him up. If God was really interested in me, He didn't need constant
      reminding. When He had a world to manage, it seemed best not to interrupt
      Him with frivolous petitions, but to put my prayers into my work. That's
      how we all feel out there.
    </p>
    <p>
      God as we see Him! I couldn't have told you how I saw Him before I went to
      France. It's funny&mdash;you go away to the most damnable undertaking ever
      invented, and you come back cleaner in spirit. The one thing that redeems
      the horror is that it does make a man momentarily big enough to be in
      sympathy with his Creator&mdash;he gets such glimpses of Him in his
      fellows.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was a time when I thought it was rather up to God to explain Himself
      to the creatures He had fashioned&mdash;since then I've acquired the point
      of view of a soldier. I've learnt discipline and my own total
      unimportance. In the Army discipline gets possession of your soul; you
      learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, to think of others before
      yourself. You learn to jump at an order, to forsake your own convenience
      at any hour of the day or night, to go forward on the most lonely and
      dangerous errands without complaining. You learn to feel that there is
      only one thing that counts in life and only one thing you can make out of
      it&mdash;the spirit you have developed in encountering its difficulties.
      Your body is nothing; it can be smashed in a minute. How frail it is you
      never realise until you have seen men smashed. So you learn to tolerate
      the body, to despise Death and to place all your reliance on courage&mdash;which
      when it is found at its best is the power to endure for the sake of
      others.
    </p>
    <p>
      When we think of God, we think of Him in just about the same way that a
      Tommy in the front-line thinks of Sir Douglas Haig. Heaven is a kind of
      General Headquarters. All that the Tommy in the front-line knows of an
      offensive is that orders have reached him, through the appointed
      authorities, that at zero hour he will climb out of his trench and go over
      the top to meet a reasonable chance of wounds and death. He doesn't say,
      &ldquo;I don't know whether I will climb out. I never saw Sir Douglas Haig&mdash;there
      mayn't be any such person. I want to have a chat with him first. If I
      agree with him, after that I may go over the top&mdash;and, then again, I
      may not. We'll see about it.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      Instead, he attributes to his Commander-in-Chief the same patriotism, love
      of duty, and courage which he himself tries to practice. He believes that
      if he and Sir Douglas Haig were to change places, Sir Douglas Haig would
      be quite as willing to sacrifice himself. He obeys; he doesn't question.
    </p>
    <p>
      That's the way every Tommy and officer comes to think of God&mdash;as a
      Commander-in-Chief whom he has never seen, but whose orders he blindly
      carries out.
    </p>
    <p>
      The religion of the trenches is not a religion which analyses God with
      impertinent speculation. It isn't a religion which takes up much of His
      time. It's a religion which teaches men to carry on stoutly and to say,
      &ldquo;I've tried to do my bit as best I know how. I guess God knows it. If I
      'go west' to-day, He'll remember that I played the game. So I guess He'll
      forget about my sins and take me to Himself.&rdquo;
     </p>
    <p>
      That is the simple religion of the trenches as I have learnt it&mdash;a
      religion not without glory; to carry on as bravely as you know how, and to
      trust God without worrying Him.
    </p>
    <h3>
      THE END
    </h3>
    <div style="height: 6em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>







<pre>





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