XIV

Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid in their height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for the officers I knew, yet hoped I should not see them—that man who had given a farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our billet, that other one who knew he would be wounded, those two young brothers who had played cricket on a sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but saw only columns of men, staring grimly ahead of them, with strange, unspeakable thoughts behind their masklike faces.

It was not until the morning of the 26th that the Commander-in-Chief "placed them at the disposal of the General Officer commanding First Army," and it was on the afternoon of Monday, the 27th, that they were ordered to attack.

By that time we had lost Fosse 8, one brigade of the 9th Scottish Division having been flung back to its own trenches after desperate fighting, at frightful cost, after the capture of the Hohenzollern redoubt by the 26th Brigade of that division. To the north of them the 7th Division was also suffering horrible losses after the capture of the quarries, near Hulluch, and the village of Haisnes, which afterward was lost. The commanding officers of both divisions, General Capper of the 7th, and General Thesiger of the 9th, were killed as they reconnoitered the ground, and wounded men were pouring down to the casualty clearing stations if they had the luck to get so far. Some of them had not that luck, but lay for nearly two days before they were rescued by the stretcher-bearers from Quality Street and Philosophe.

It was bad all along the line. The whole plan had gone astray from the beginning. With an optimism which was splendid in fighting-men and costly in the High Command, our men had attacked positions of enormous strength—held by an enemy in the full height of his power—without sufficient troops in reserve to follow up and support the initial attack, to consolidate the ground, and resist inevitable counter-attacks. What reserves the Commander-in-Chief had he held "in his own hand" too long and too far back.

The Guards went in when the enemy was reorganized to meet them. The 28th Division, afterward in support, was too late to be a decisive factor.

I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame him, as I am not a soldier nor a military expert. He did his best, with the highest motives. The blunders he made were due to ignorance of modern battles. Many other generals made many other blunders, and our men paid with their lives. Our High Command had to learn by mistakes, by ghastly mistakes, repeated often, until they became visible to the military mind and were paid for again by the slaughter of British youth. One does not blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself, does not sit in judgment. He has no right to judge. He merely cries out, "O God!... O God!" in remembrance of all that agony and that waste of splendid boys who loved life, and died.

On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of danger. The Scots of the 15th Division, weakened by many losses and exhausted by their long fatigue, had been forced to abandon the important position of Puits 14—a mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in defense with the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side of Hill 70. The Germans had been given time to bring up their reserves, to reorganize their broken lines, and to get their batteries into action again.

There was a consultation of anxious brigadiers in Loos when no man could find safe shelter owing to the heavy shelling which now ravaged among the houses. Rations were running short, and rain fell through the roofless ruins, and officers and men shivered in wet clothes. Dead bodies blown into bits, headless trunks, pools of blood, made a ghastly mess in the roadways and the houses. Badly wounded men were dragged down into the cellars, and lay there in the filth of Friday's fighting. The headquarters of one of the London brigades had put up in a roofless barn, but were shelled out, and settled down on some heaps of brick in the open. It was as cold as death in the night, and no fire could be lighted, and iron rations were the only food, until two chaplains, "R. C." and Church of England (no difference of dogma then), came up as volunteers in a perilous adventure, with bottles of hot soup in mackintoshes. They brought a touch of human warmth to the brigade staff, made those hours of the night more endurable, but the men farther forward had no such luck. They were famishing and soaked, in a cold hell where shells tossed up the earth about them and spattered them with the blood and flesh of their comrades.

On Monday morning the situation was still more critical, all along the line, and the Guards were ordered up to attack Hill 70, to which only a few Scots were clinging on the near slopes. The 6th Cavalry Brigade dismounted—no more dreams of exploiting success and galloping round Lens—were sent into Loos with orders to hold the village at all cost, with the men of the 15th Division, who had been left there.

The Londoners were still holding on to the chalk-pit south of Loos, under murderous fire.

It was a bad position for the troops sent into action at that stage. The result of the battle on September 25th had been to create a salient thrust like a wedge into the German position and enfiladed by their guns. The sides of the salient ran sharply back—from Hulluch in the north, past the chalk-quarries to Givenchy, and in the south from the lower slopes of Hill 70 past the Double Crassier to Grenay. The orders given to the Guards were to straighten out this salient on the north by capturing the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14, to the north of it, and the chalk-pit still farther north.

It was the 2d Brigade of Guards, including Grenadiers, Welsh and Scots Guards, which was to lead the assault, while the 1st Brigade on the left maintained a holding position and the 3d Brigade was in support, immediately behind.

As soon as the Guards started to attack they were met by a heavy storm of gas-shells. This checked them for a time, as smoke-helmets—the old fashioned things of flannel which were afterward changed for the masks with nozzles—had to be served out, and already men were choking and gasping in the poisonous fumes. Among them was the colonel of the Grenadiers, whose command was taken over by the major. Soon the men advanced again, looking like devils, as, in artillery formation (small separate groups), they groped their way through the poisoned clouds. Shrapnel and high explosives burst over them and among them, and many men fell as they came within close range of the enemy's positions running from Hill 70 northward to the chalk-pit.

The Irish Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, advanced down the valley beyond Loos and gained the lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the chalk-pit, while the Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14 and the building in its group of houses known as the Keep. Another body of Guards, including Grenadiers and Welsh, attacked at the same time the lower slopes of Hill 70.

Puits 14 itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, led by an officer named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, routing out the enemy from the houses. Some companies of the Grenadiers came to the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards, but suffered heavy losses themselves. A platoon under a young lieutenant named Ayres Ritchie reached the Puits, and, storming their way into the Keep, knocked out a machine-gun, mounted on the second floor, by a desperate bombing attack. The officer held on in a most dauntless way to the position, until almost every man was either killed or wounded, unable to receive support, owing to the enfilade fire of the German machine-guns.

Night had now come on, the sky lightened by the bursting of shells and flares, and terrible in its tumult of battle. Some of the Coldstreamers had gained possession of the chalk-pit, which they were organizing into a strong defensive position, and various companies of the Guards divisions, after heroic assaults upon Hill 70, where they were shattered by the fire which met them on the crest from the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side, had dug themselves into the lower slopes.

There was a strange visitor that day at the headquarters of the Guards division, where Lord Cavan was directing operations. A young officer came in and said, quite calmly: "Sir, I have to report that my battalion has been cut to pieces. We have been utterly destroyed."

Lord Cavan questioned him, and then sent for another officer. "Look after that young man," he said, quietly. "He is mad. It is a case of shell-shock."

Reports came through of a mysterious officer going the round of the batteries, saying that the Germans had broken through and that they had better retire. Two batteries did actually move away.

Another unknown officer called out, "Retire! Retire!" until he was shot through the head. "German spies!" said some of our officers and men, but the Intelligence branch said, "Not spies... madmen... poor devils!"

Before the dawn came the Coldstreamers made another desperate attempt to attack and hold Puits 14, but the position was too deadly even for their height of valor, and although some men pushed on into this raging fire, the survivors had to fall back to the woods, where they strengthened their defensive works.

On the following day the position was the same, the sufferings of our men being still further increased by heavy shelling from 8-inch howitzers. Colonel Egerton of the Coldstream Guards and his adjutant were killed in the chalk-pit.

It was now seen by the headquarters staff of the Guards Division that Puits 14 was untenable, owing to its enfilading by heavy artillery, and the order was given for a retirement to the chalk-pit, which was a place of sanctuary owing to the wonderful work done throughout the night to strengthen its natural defensive features by sand—bags and barbed wire, in spite of machine-guns which raked it from the neighboring woods.

The retirement was done as though the men were on parade, slowly, and in perfect order, across the field of fire, each man bearing himself, so their officers told me, as though at the Trooping of the Colors, until now one and then another fell in a huddled heap. It was an astonishing tribute to the strength of tradition among troops. To safeguard the honor of a famous name these men showed such dignity in the presence of death that even the enemy must have been moved to admiration.

But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and the Commander-in-Chief had to call upon the French for help, realizing that without strong assistance the salient made by that battle of Loos would be a death-trap. The French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus failing to give the British troops protection on their right flank.

"On representing this to General Joffre," wrote Sir John French, "he was kind enough to ask the commander of the northern group of French armies to render us assistance. General Foch met those demands in the same friendly spirit which he has always displayed throughout the course of the whole campaign, and expressed his readiness to give me all the support he could. On the morning of the 28th we discussed the situation, and the general agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take over the ground occupied by us, extending from the French left up to and including that portion of Hill 70 which we were holding, and also the village of Loos. This relief was commenced on September 30th, and completed on the two following nights."

So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter—attack delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles, more frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves of living men were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir John French's staff estimated the number of German dead as from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make any accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping.

What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille, nor even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody slopes where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on one slag heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they could, a few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth was blown up by mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living death in lousy caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient, narrower than that of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country beyond Loos.

The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it spoke in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things which were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men, asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the soldiers they led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter, laughing with despairing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who had been lured on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German weakness, and looking ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as this which would lead only to other salients, after desperate and futile endeavor.



PART FOUR. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT



I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men—ours and the enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys—British, French, and German—on the western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing a vision of the war's end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we had gained—the new horror of that new salient—had sapped into the confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only "asking for trouble" from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.

"It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men," said the generals. "We must maintain an aggressive policy."

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another "small operation" might be organized. There was a competition among the corps and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

"My corps," one old general told me over a cup of tea in his headquarters mess, "beats the record for raids." His casualties also beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just bluntly and simply, "Our old murderer." They disliked the necessity of dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition with the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited for the explosion of a mine which afterward they had to "rush" in a race with the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the proceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off by German stick-bombs or shells. "What's the good of it?" they asked, and could find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he had "raised hell" again.



II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled down—knee-deep where the trenches were worst—for the winter campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of the ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of moisture settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy's lines, where he stayed invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were in that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been clogged in the mud after the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and to advance artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which had no object except "to keep up the spirit of the men." There was always work to do in the trenches—draining them, strengthening their parapets, making their walls, tiling or boarding their floorways, timbering the dugouts, and after it was done another rainstorm or snowstorm undid most of it, and the parapets slid down, the water poured in, and spaces were opened for German machine-gun fire, and there was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which mixed with the raindrops, and high explosives which smashed through the mud. The working parties had a bad time and a wet one, in spite of waders and gum boots which were served out to lucky ones. Some of them wore a new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with guffaws—the "tin" hat which later became the headgear of all fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there was "Nothing to report."

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their "bully," and endured it all with the philosophy of "grin and bear it!" and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places between explosive curses.

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable, not because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked the English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of our men in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts—due to an industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in the ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with such rivers in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to drain the Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together—only a few yards apart—our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud with sucking, gurgling noises.

"They're drinking soup again!" said our humorists.

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their common misery.

"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier.

His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which divided the enemy and ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.

"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

"So?... You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it."

It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was the frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks sink under their weight of sand-bags. German and English soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned from their nests by a minor landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended that the other fellows were not there. They had not been properly introduced. In another place, reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted: "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their legs, and grinning at the gray ants yonder, until these incidents were reported back to G. H. Q.—where good fires were burning under dry roofs—and stringent orders came against "fraternization." Every German who showed himself was to be shot. Of course any Englishman who showed himself—owing to a parapet falling in—would be shot, too. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, but the dignity of G. H. Q. would not be outraged by the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and Germans refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of the men obeyed orders, and when a German sat up and said, "Don't shoot!" plugged him through the head. Others were extremely short-sighted... Now and again Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly to be taken prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke with them.

"There is no sense in this war," said one of them. "It is misery on both sides. There is no use in it."

That thought of war's futility inspired an episode which was narrated throughout the army in that winter of '15, and led to curious conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words

"The English are fools."

"Not such bloody fools as all that!" said a sergeant, and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

"The French are fools."

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board.

A third plank was put up:

"We're all fools. Let's all go home."

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter, and men repeating it said: "There's a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on? What's it all about? Let the old men who made this war come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We all want to go home to our wives and our work."

But neither side was prepared to "go home" first. Each side was in a trap—a devil's trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors, newspapers, generals, staff-officers, old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a deep and simple love for England and Germany, pride of manhood, fear of cowardice—a thousand complexities of thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in which they were entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, "We're all fools!... Let's all go home!"

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an army and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their doom. But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of "We're all fools!" and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at times, after August 8th, in the last year of war.



III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called "trench-foot." Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go "dead," and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the "reliefs" went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new disease—"trench-foot." Those medical officers looked serious as the number of cases increased.

"This is getting beyond a joke," they said. "It is pulling down the battalion strength worse than wounds."

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of the trenches.

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Remy siding, near Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton-wool. The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning fagots for conscience' sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding) Division there were over four hundred cases in that winter of '15. Other battalions in the Ypres salient suffered as much.

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that the malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and would not be beaten by it.

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down to the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in mud, with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the water, red with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought down, less a leg, to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man about to die... But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his wife.

"I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me," he began. He mentioned that he had had an "accident" which had taken one of his legs away. "But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg," he wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed marveled at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such courage as that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and lay next to a comrade on the operating table.

"Stick it, lad!" he said, "stick it!" and turned his head a little to look at his friend.

Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duck-boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.



IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks) nicknamed "Big Willie," near another trench called "Little Willie." Our enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug themselves into this graveyard where their dead and ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value in it—so close to the German lines that one could not cough for fear of losing one's head. It seemed to me a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling thought!) I should have said: "Let the enemy have that little hell of his. Let men live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and the stench of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him will be an abomination, dreaded by his men."

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to "bite it off," that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line. It was an operation that would be good to report in the official communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their losses forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was given on October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters, on the night of the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire upon the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a group of colliers' houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse 8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black hillock farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy's barbed wire and front trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of the war zone.

"The English are attacking again!" was the message which brought out these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in the September battle—a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then curled forward to the enemy's lines.

"That's our gas!" said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of observers—English and French officers.

"And the wind is dead right for it," said another voice. "The Germans will get a taste of it this time!"

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little. They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind its curtain—men caught in those fumes, the terror-stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the realization of the things that were happening beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across a stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched together in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on until they disappeared in the drifting clouds.

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers. The Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were curiously colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green. They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the chemistry of death was poured out on both sides—and through it went the men of the Midland Division.

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire men, who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which formed the southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush, half blinded by the smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air, and were at once received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks, and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung out in extended order.

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell cheered their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by numbers which dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the Big Willie trench in the first assault.

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other Germans followed, flinging their own stick-bombs.

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded and many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the Big Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was another barrier, in case the first should be rushed.

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were swarming up Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon blast a way through unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand-grenades. It was a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South Staffordshire men, who went forward to meet this attack and kept the enemy back until four o'clock in the afternoon, when only a few living men stood among the dead and they had to fall back to the second barrier.

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and in the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while those who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sand-bags and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay in fierce industry.

Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to the relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie trench. They were Nottingham men—Robin Hoods and other Sherwood lads—and they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking the west as well as the east ends of the German communication trenches which formed the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met by intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were blown to bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in Big Willie trench.

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on the right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October 13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor. Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were successful in reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire, part of which was uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the north base of the salient.

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an hour in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed on naked ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas and smoke; all the abomination of battle—he moaning of the wounded, the last cries of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings holding their broken limbs and their entrails—was around them, and in front a hidden enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better position.

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor, bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed till dark, and then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up the Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as they stood among their dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed that night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was found in the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the target of a hand-grenade.

From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and sometimes falling very close—close enough to kill.

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still intact by bombing and bombing.

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long the barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind him, so that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him—and over him.

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, and as it was built that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and that he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with him—I never learned their names—and they were hardly enough to hand up bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs. "More!" he said, "More!" and his hand was like a machine reaching out and throwing.

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the barricade which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his way of escape.

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on to their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing the enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.

It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack made by the enemy at a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing duels continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have endured so long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of October 15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts, and the Midland men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found themselves engaged in a new action. They had to fight again before they could go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their right of way and home, and bombed the enemy back to his holes in the ground.

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of England, whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg line along the great canal south of St.-Quentin.

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage, before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.

And through the winter of '15, and the years that followed, the Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood, and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls stank of new and ancient death.

* * *

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern. It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and showed the quality of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing—party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle—the miracle of human courage—he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench, mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk—but made his way along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a violent counter-attack.

Men fell rapidly under the enemy's bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were beginning to have the wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was repulsed after two hours' fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his wounds to be bandaged. From the dug—out where he lay while the bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men, until he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V. C., but died of his wounds.

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff's—by name Smeltzer—withdrew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of nothing except that "when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped I came out again."

There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare—one V. C., sixteen D. S. C.'s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals—were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time, made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs.



V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, "Listen!"

Through the open door came the music of a mouth—organ, and it was playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the window-panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant guns.

"Christmas Eve!" said an officer. "Nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago... and now—this!"

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been busy—and where the spirit of evil lay in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of the enemy's guns. Already six hundred civilians—mostly women and children—had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots—a French Hop o' My Thumb in the giant's boots—was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: "My heart is to you." "Good luck." "To the success!" "Remind France."

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending it.

"The people at home will be glad of 'em," he said. "I s'pose one can't forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain't the same thing out here."

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply—columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard must have lifted his red gown high—waist-high—when he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy's lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, "It's best to get a move on here," and, "This road is swept by machine—gun fire," and, "I don't like this corner; it's quite unhealthy."

But that absurd idea—of Santa Claus in the trenches—came into my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.

"Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?" asked a lad, grinning down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

"Likely, ain't it?" said the other boy. "Father Christmas would be a bloody fool to come out here... They'd be full of water in the morning."

"You'll get some presents," I said. "They haven't forgotten you at home."

At that word "home" the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow—perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing him—and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back to some village in Yorkshire.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas with contemptuous irony.

"A happy Christmas!" said one of them, with a laugh. "Plenty of crackers about this year! Tom Smith ain't in it."

"And I hope we're going to give the Boches some Christmas presents," said another. "They deserve it, I don't think!"

"No truce this year?" I asked.

"A truce?... We're not going to allow any monkey—tricks on the parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We've got to get on with the war. That's my motto."

Other men said: "We wouldn't mind a holiday. We're fed up to the neck with all this muck."

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were bursting, and behind the lines our "heavies" were busily at work firing at long range.

"On earth peace, good-will toward men."

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines, and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.



VI

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and there was no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence. It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories, to thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The "heavies" were indulging in a special strafe this New—Year's eve. As I went down a road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All about me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year's eve rejoicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge of the battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses were blown to pieces, and when here and there through a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's white face peering out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen a ghost-face in some black pit of hell.

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New—Year's eve, I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the broad desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.

* * *

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It was a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see what "Tommy" was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki, who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a Brock's benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise. One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his life. Another confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour was a long thrill.

"I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had fought in several naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, "that I had a fair fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put my head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack... But I'm blessed if it wasn't a swarm of rats!"

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of the bluejackets.

"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man.

"All as cool as cucumbers," said a petty officer, "and take the discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It's marvelous. Good luck to them in the new year!"

* * *

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed to die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that New-Year's day.

They were the heroes of Loos—or some of them—Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their battalions have been filled up with new drafts—of the same type as themselves and of the same grit—but that day no ghost of grief, no dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in those days of the September battle.

There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in, and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it.

"And they're grand, the pipes," said one of the Camerons. "When I've been sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an' dee'd the touch o' the pipes has fair lifted me up agen."

The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for Highlanders, who sang old songs full of melancholy, which seemed to make the hearts of his comrades grow glad as when they helped him with "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond." But the roof nearly flew off the hall to "The March of the Cameron Men," and the walls were greatly strained when the regimental marching song broke at every verse into wild Highland shouts and the war-cry which was heard at Loos of "Camerons, forward!" "Forward, Camerons!"

"An Englishman is good," said one of the Camerons, leaning over the table to me, "and an Irishman is good, but a Scot is the best of all." Then he struck the palm of one hand with the fist of another. "But the London men," he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good memory, "are as good as any fighting-men in France. My word, ye should have seen 'em on September 25th. And the London Irish were just lions!"

Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a battalion of Argylls and Sutherlands, with several of his officers; a tall, thin officer with a long stride, who was killed when another year had passed. He beckoned to me and said: "I'm going the rounds of the billets to wish the men good luck in the new year. It's a strain on the constitution, as I have to drink their health each time!"

He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something noble and chivalrous in the way he spoke to all his men, gathered together in various rooms in old Flemish houses, round plum-pudding from home or feasts provided by the army cooks. To each group of men he made the same kind of speech, thanking them from his heart for all their courage.

"You were thanked by three generals," he said, "after your attack at Loos, and you upheld the old reputation of the regiment. I'm proud of you. And afterward, in November, when you had the devil of a time in the trenches, you stuck it splendidly and came out with high spirits. I wish you all a happy new year, and whatever the future may bring I know I can count on you."

In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, and another three for the staff captain, and though the colonel protested that he was afraid of spending a night in the guard-room (there were shouts of laughter at this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the custom of the day.

"Toodle-oo, old bird!" said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not hear this familiar way of address.

In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year's day was kept in good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in the year that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields.



VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they were most dangerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went out on red-Indian adventures over No Man's Land for fierce and scientific slaughter.

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party of them—all volunteers—went out one night with intent to get through the barbed wire outside a strong German position, to do a lot of killing there. They had trained for the job and thought out every detail of this hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so that they would not show white in the enemy's flares. They fastened flash-lamps to their bayonets so that they might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to save their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire.

Stealthily they crawled over No Man's Land, crouching in shell-holes every time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their time at the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs crawled up with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. Then through the gap into the German trenches, and there were screams of German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood. It was butcher's work, quick and skilful, like red-Indian scalping. Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians went back, with only two casualties... The Germans were horrified by this sudden slaughter. They dared not come out on patrol work. Canadian scouts crawled down to them and insulted them, ingeniously, vilely, but could get no answer. Later they trained their machine—guns on German working-parties and swept crossroads on which supplies came up, and the Canadian sniper, in one shell-hole or another, lay for hours in sulky patience, and at last got his man... They had to pay for all this, at Maple Copse, in June of '15, as I shall tell. But it was a vendetta which did not end until the war ended, and the Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience which at last brought them to Mons on the day before armistice.

I saw a good deal of the Canadians from first to last, and on many days of battle saw the tough, hard fighting spirit of these men. Their generals believed in common sense applied to war, and not in high mysteries and secret rites which cannot be known outside the circle of initiation. I was impressed by General Currie, whom I met for the first time in that winter of 1915-16, and wrote at the time that I saw in him "a leader of men who in open warfare might win great victories by doing the common-sense thing rapidly and decisively, to the surprise of an enemy working by elaborate science. He would, I think, astound them by the simplicity of his smashing stroke." Those words of mine were fulfilled—on the day when the Canadians helped to break the Drocourt-Queant line, and when they captured Cambrai, with English troops on their right, who shared their success. General Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his men. He led them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great and terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real—estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and tradition which swathed round so many of our own leaders.

He cut clean to the heart of things, ruthlessly, like a surgeon, and as I watched that man, immense in bulk, with a heavy, thoughtful face and stern eyes that softened a little when he smiled, I thought of him as Oliver Cromwell. He was severe as a disciplinarian, and not beloved by many men. But his staff-officers, who stood in awe of him, knew that he demanded truth and honesty, and that his brain moved quickly to sure decisions and saw big problems broadly and with understanding. He had good men with him—mostly amateurs—but with hard business heads and the same hatred of red tape and niggling ways which belonged to their chief. So the Canadian Corps became a powerful engine on our side when it had learned many lessons in blood and tragedy. They organized their publicity side in the same masterful way, and were determined that what Canada did the world should know—and damn all censorship. They bought up English artists, photographers, and writing—men to record their exploits. With Lord Beaverbrook in England they engineered Canadian propaganda with immense energy, and Canada believed her men made up the British army and did all the fighting. I do not blame them, and only wish that the English soldier should have been given his share of the honors that belonged to him—the lion's share.



VIII

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part of the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English and Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck with it, and some men liked it, and to others it was a horror which they had to do, and always it was a fluky, nervy job, when any accident might lead to tragedy.

I remember one such raid by the 12th West Yorks in January of '15, which was typical of many others, before raids developed into minor battles, with all the guns at work.

There were four lieutenants who drew up the plan and called for volunteers, and it was one of these who went out first and alone to reconnoiter the ground and to find the best way through the German barbed wire. He just slipped out over the parapet and disappeared into the darkness. When he came back he had a wound in the wrist—it was just the bad luck of a chance bullet—but brought in valuable knowledge. He had found a gap in the enemy's wire which would give an open door to the party of visitors. He had also tested the wire farther along, and thought it could be cut without much bother.

"Good enough!" was the verdict, and a detachment started out for No Man's Land, divided into two parties.

The enemy trenches were about one hundred yards away, which seems a mile in the darkness and the loneliness of the dead ground. At regular intervals the German rockets flared up so that the hedges and wire and parapets along their line were cut out ink-black against the white illumination, and the two patrols of Yorkshiremen who had been crawling forward stopped and crouched lower and felt themselves revealed, and then when darkness hid them again went on.

The party on the left were now close to the German wire and under the shelter of a hedge. They felt their way along until the two subalterns who were leading came to the gap which had been reported by the first explorer. They listened intently and heard the German sentry stamping his feet and pacing up and down. Presently he began to whistle softly, utterly unconscious of the men so close to him—so close now that any stumble, any clatter of arms, any word spoken, would betray them.

The two lieutenants had their revolvers ready and crept forward to the parapet. The men had to act according to instinct now, for no order could be given, and one of them found his instinct led him to clamber right into the German trench a few yards away from the sentry, but on the other side of the traverse. He had not been there long, holding his breath and crouching like a wolf, before footsteps came toward him and he saw the glint of a cigarette.

It was a German officer going his round. The Yorkshire boy sprang on to the parapet again, and lay across it with his head toward our lines and his legs dangling in the German trench. The German officer's cloak brushed his heels, but the boy twisted round a little and stared at him as he passed. But he passed, and presently the sentry began to whistle again, some old German tune which cheered him in his loneliness. He knew nothing of the eyes watching him through the darkness nor of his nearness to death.

It was the first lieutenant who tried to shoot him. But the revolver was muddy and would not fire. Perhaps a click disturbed the sentry. Anyhow, the moment had come for quick work. It was the sergeant who sprang upon him, down from the parapet with one pounce. A frightful shriek, with the shrill agony of a boy's voice, wailed through the silence. The sergeant had his hand about the German boy's throat and tried to strangle him and to stop another dreadful cry.

The second officer made haste. He thrust his revolver close to the struggling sentry and shot him dead, through the neck, just as he was falling limp from a blow on the head given by the butt-end of the weapon which had failed to fire. The bullet did its work, though it passed through the sergeant's hand, which had still held the man by the throat. The alarm had been raised and German soldiers were running to the rescue.

"Quick!" said one of the officers.

There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop into the wet ditch, and a race for home over No Man's Land, which was white under the German flares and noisy with the waspish note of bullets.

The other party were longer away and had greater trouble to find a way through, but they, too, got home, with one officer badly wounded, and wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from "the jumps" for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own barbed wire, as though the English were out there again. And at the sound of those bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.



IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years of war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until a few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their left hand from their right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the northern bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland, though she would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and the blood of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish boys at the beginning of '16 that I found it hard not to believe that a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the loft, to which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.

I went up the ladder after them—it was very shaky in the middle—and, putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.

"The craytures are that bold," said a boy from County Cork, "that when we first came in they sat up smilin' and sang 'God Save Ireland.' Bedad, and it's the truth I'm after tellin' ye."

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.

There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling was so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some of the boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only complaint which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of his first experience under fire.

"It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I'd been after thinking, if only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all."

The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out from the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When the Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get over the parapet and make a dash for the enemy. "'Twould taych him a lesson," they told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining them.

These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind the lines at night—out in the open, without the shelter of a trench. It was nervous work, especially when the German flares went up, silhouetting their figures on the sky-line, and when one of the enemy's machine-guns began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the heart for a jest, and one of them, resting on his spade a moment, stared over to the enemy's lines and said, "May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that typewriter!"

It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to the trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war until then. But they came out proudly—"with their tails up," said one of their officers—after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors—who were myself and another—the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their breath for "the good old Irish tune" demanded by the captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays, and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They're hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the "March of O'Neill," a wild old air as shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish battle-cries against Elizabeth's pikemen and Cromwell's Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys who were out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself, with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry across the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy, a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn, and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along. But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them, after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.



X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders were white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak down each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills of Flanders which looked down upon the battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes, so that each rib of their sails and each rung of their ladders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun—limbers drawn up by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals, were all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of the traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places of fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers and keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man's Land, making a lace-work pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly over the tumbled ground of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes fluttered upon stark bodies there, and shrouded them tenderly. It was as though all the doves of peace were flying down to fold their wings above the obscene things of war.

For a little while the snow brought something like peace. The guns were quieter, for artillery observation was impossible. There could be no sniping, for the scurrying flakes put a veil between the trenches. The airplanes which went up in the morning came down quickly to the powdered fields and took shelter in their sheds. A great hush was over the war zone, but there was something grim, suggestive of tragic drama, in this silent countryside, so white even in the darkness, where millions of men were waiting to kill one another.

Behind the lines the joke of the snow was seen by soldiers, who were quick to see a chance of fun. Men who had been hurling bombs in the Ypres salient bombarded one another with hand-grenades, which burst noiselessly except for the shouts of laughter that signaled a good hit.

French soldiers were at the same game in one village I passed, where the snow-fight was fast and furious, and some of our officers led an attack upon old comrades with the craft of trappers and an expert knowledge of enfilade fire. The white peace did not last long. The ermine mantle on the battlefield was stained by scarlet patches as soon as men could see to fight again.



XI

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the Chateau of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line, were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor-cars could move through that snow which drifted across the roads. We sat indoors talking—high treason sometimes—pondering over the problem of a war from which there seemed no way out, becoming irritable with one another's company, becoming passionate in argument about the ethics of war, the purpose of man, the gospel of Christ, the guilt of Germany, and the dishonesty of British politicians. Futile, foolish arguments, while men were being killed in great numbers, as daily routine, without result!

Officers of a division billeted nearby came in to dine with us, some of them generals with elaborate theories on war and a passionate hatred of Germany, seeing no other evil in the world; some of them brigadiers with tales of appalling brutality (which caused great laughter), some of them battalion officers with the point of view of those who said, "Morituri te saluant!"

There was one whose conversation I remember (having taken notes of it before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation, summing up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray sentences by other officers, and month by month, years afterward, heard again, spoken with passion. This officer who had come out to France in 1914 and had been fighting ever since by a luck which had spared his life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q. was a close corporation in the hands of the military clique who had muddled through the South African War, and were now going to muddle through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind impregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape, and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots who believed that the Empire depended upon their system. They had no doubt of their inherent right to conduct the war, which was "their war," without interference or criticism or publicity. They spent many hours of the days and nights in writing letters to one another, and those who wrote most letters received most decorations, and felt, with a patriotic fire within their breasts, that they were getting on with the war.

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues, perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each general and staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who jostled for one another's jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and made him believe in his omniscience. Among the General Staff there were various grades—G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and those in the lower grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and diplomacy and back-stair influence. They worked late into the night. That is to say, they went back to their offices after dining at mess—"so frightfully busy, you know, old man!"—and kept their lights burning, and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another up on the telephone with futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing something from being down somewhere. The war to them was a far-off thing essential to their way of life, as miners in the coal-fields are essential to statesmen in Downing Street, especially in cold weather. But it did not touch their souls or their bodies. They did not see its agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were always cheerful, breezy, bright with optimism. They made a little work go a long way. They were haughty and arrogant with subordinate officers, or at the best affable and condescending, and to superior officers they said, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," "Quite so, sir," to any statement, however absurd in its ignorance and dogmatism. If a major-general said, "Wagner was a mountebank in music," G.S.O. III, who had once studied at Munich, said, "Yes, sir," or, "You think so, sir? Of course you're right."

If a lieutenant-colonel said, "Browning was not a poet," a staff captain, who had read Browning at Cambridge with passionate admiration, said: "I quite agree with you, sir. And who do you think was a poet, sir?"

It was the army system. The opinion of a superior officer was correct, always. It did not admit of contradiction. It was not to be criticized. Its ignorance was wisdom.

G. H. Q. lived, said our guest, in a world of its own, rose-colored, remote from the ugly things of war. They had heard of the trenches, yes, but as the West End hears of the East End—a nasty place where common people lived. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society folk go slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst, having braved the lice and the dirt.

"The trenches are the slums," said our guest. "We are the Great Unwashed. We are the Mud-larks."

There was a trench in the salient called J. 3. It was away out in advance of our lines. It was not connected with our own trench system. It had been left derelict by both sides and was a ditch in No Man's Land. But our men were ordered to hold it—"to save sniping." A battalion commander protested to the Headquarters Staff. There was no object in holding J. 3. It was a target for German guns and a temptation to German miners.

"J. 3," came the staff command, "must be held until further orders."

We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown.

Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. "This is a death sentence," said the officers who were ordered to attack. But they attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual.

"In the slums," said our guest, "we are expected to die if G. H. Q. tells us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we do."

That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the rumbling of the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the groans of men at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places. The irony of that guest of ours was frightful. It was bitter beyond justice, though with truth in the mockery, the truth of a soul shocked by the waste of life and heroism;... when I met him later in the war he was on the staff.



XII

The world—our side of it—held its breath and felt its own heart-beat when, in February of that year '15, the armies of the German Crown Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. It was the biggest offensive since their first drive down to the Marne; and as the days passed and they hurled fresh masses of men against the French and brought up new guns to replace their losses, there was no doubt that in this battle the Germans were trying by all their weight to smash their way to victory through the walls which the French had built against them by living flesh and spirit.

"Will they hold?" was the question which every man among us asked of his neighbor and of his soul.

On our front there was nothing of war beyond the daily routine of the trenches and the daily list of deaths and wounds. Winter had closed down upon us in Flanders, and through its fogs and snows came the news of that conflict round Verdun to the waiting army, which was ours. The news was bad, yet not the worst. Poring over maps of the French front, we in our winter quarters saw with secret terror, some of us with a bluster of false optimism, some of us with unjustified despair, that the French were giving ground, giving ground slowly, after heroic resistance, after dreadful massacre, and steadily. They were falling back to the inner line of forts, hard pressed. The Germans, in spite of monstrous losses under the flail of the soixante-quinzes, were forcing their way from slope to slope, capturing positions which all but dominated the whole of the Verdun heights.

"If the French break we shall lose the war," said the pessimist.

"The French will never lose Verdun," said the optimist.

"Why not? What are your reasons beyond that cursed optimism which has been our ruin? Why announce things like that as though divinely inspired? For God's sake let us stare straight at the facts."

"The Germans are losing the war by this attack on Verdun. They are just pouring their best soldiers into the furnace—burning the flower of their army. It is our gain. It will lead in the end to our victory."

"But, my dear good fool, what about the French losses? Don't they get killed, too? The German artillery is flogging them with shell-fire from seventeen-inch guns, twelve-inch, nine-inch, every bloody and monstrous engine. The French are weak in heavy artillery. For that error, which has haunted them from the beginning, they are now paying with their life's blood—the life blood of France."

"You are arguing on emotion and fear. Haven't you learned yet that the attacking side always loses more than the defense?"

"That is a sweeping statement. It depends on relative man-power and gun-power. Given a superiority of guns and men, and attack is cheap. Defense is blown off the earth. Otherwise how could we ever hope to win?"

"I agree. But the forces at Verdun are about equal, and the French have the advantage of position. The Germans are committing suicide."

"Humbug! They know what they are doing. They are the greatest soldiers in Europe."

"Led by men with bone heads."

"By great scientists."

"By the traditional rules of medievalism. By bald—headed vultures in spectacles with brains like penny-in—the-slot machines. Put in a penny and out comes a rule of war. Mad egoists! Colossal blunderers! Efficient in all things but knowledge of life."

"Then God help our British G.H.Q.!"

A long silence. The silence of men who see monstrous forces at work, in which human lives are tossed like straws in flame. A silence reaching back to old ghosts of history, reaching out to supernatural aid. Then from one speaker or another a kind of curse and a kind of prayer.

"Hell!... God help us all!"

So it was in our mess where war correspondents and censors sat down together after futile journeys to dirty places to see a bit of shell-fire, a few dead bodies, a line of German trenches through a periscope, a queue of wounded men outside a dressing station, the survivors of a trench raid, a bombardment before a "minor operation," a trench-mortar "stunt," a new part of the line... Verdun was the only thing that mattered in March and April until France had saved herself and all of us.