Near the line of battle, through outlying villages and past broken farms, companies of Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway or the safer side of a brick wall.  I stared into their faces and saw how dead they looked.  It seemed as if their vital spark had already been put out by the storm of battle.  Their eyes were sunken and quite expressionless.  For week after week, night after night, they had been exposed to shell-fire, and something had died within them—­perhaps the desire to live.  Every now and then some of them would duck their heads as a shell burst within fifty or a hundred yards of them, and I saw then that fear could still live in the hearts of men who had become accustomed to the constant chance of death.  For fear exists with the highest valour, and its psychological effect is not unknown to heroes who have the courage to confess the truth.

14

“If any man says he is not afraid of shell-fire,” said one of the bravest men I have ever met—­and at that moment we were watching how the enemy’s shrapnel was ploughing up the earth on either side of the road on which we stood—­“he is a liar!” There are very few men in this war who make any such pretence.  On the contrary, most of the French, Belgian, and English soldiers with whom I have had wayside conversations since the war began, find a kind of painful pleasure in the candid confession of their fears.

“It is now three days since I have been frightened,” said a young English officer, who, I fancy, was never scared in his life before he came out to see these battlefields of terror.

“I was paralysed with a cold and horrible fear when I was ordered to advance with my men over open ground under the enemy’s shrapnel,” said a French officer with the steady brown eyes of a man who in ordinary tests of courage would smile at the risk of death.

But this shell-fire is not an ordinary test of courage.  Courage is annihilated in the face of it.  Something else takes its place—­a philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so that men who have been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them, though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.

The old style of courage, when man had pride and confidence in his own strength and valour against other men, when he was on an equality with his enemy in arms and intelligence, has almost gone.  It has quite gone when he is called upon to advance or hold the ground in face of the enemy’s artillery.  For all human qualities are of no avail against those death-machines.  What are quickness of wit, the strength of a man’s right arm, the heroic fibre of his heart, his cunning in warfare, when he is opposed