These men who came out with the first Expeditionary Force had to endure a mode of warfare more terrible than anything the world has known before, and for week after week, month after month, they were called upon to stand firm under storms of shells which seemed to come from no human agency, but to be devilish in intensity and frightfulness of destruction.  Whole companies of them were annihilated, whole battalions decimated, yet the survivors were led to the shambles again.  Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the new-comers.  Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance, these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell.  With a pride of manhood beyond one’s imagination, with a stern and bitter contempt for all this devilish torture, loathing it but “sticking” it, very much afraid yet refusing to surrender to the coward in their souls (the coward in our souls which tempts all of us), sick of the blood and the beastliness, yet keeping sane (for the most part) with the health of normal minds and bodies in spite of all this wear and tear upon the nerves, the rank-and-file of that British Expedition in France and Flanders, under the leadership of young men who gave their lives, with the largess of great prodigals, to the monstrous appetite of Death, fought with something like superhuman qualities.

6

Although I spent most of my time on the Belgian and French side of the war, I had many glimpses of the British troops who were enduring these things, and many conversations with officers and men who had come, but a few hours ago, from the line of fire.  I went through British hospitals and British ambulance trains where thousands of them lay with new wounds, and I dined with them when after a few weeks of convalescence they returned to the front to undergo the same ordeal.  Always I felt myself touched with a kind of wonderment at these men.  After many months of war the unwounded men were still unchanged, to all outward appearance, though something had altered in their souls.  They were still quiet, self-controlled, unemotional.  Only by a slight nervousness of their hands, a slightly fidgety way so that they could not sit still for very long, and by sudden lapses into silence, did some of them show the signs of the strain upon them.  Even the lightly wounded men were astoundingly cheerful, resolute, and unbroken.  There were times when I used to think that my imagination exaggerated the things I had seen and heard, and that after all war was not so terrible, but a rather hard game with heavy risks.  It was only when I walked among the wounded