You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you.  First, we alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed.  The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed.  We went across the fields to the right.  Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him.  I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth.

In army language, theirs had not been a “good show.”  We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic.  The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all.  In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench.  When the given moment came they swept forward.  But our artillery had not “connected up” properly.

The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse.  The British had been told to charge and they charged.  Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing.  Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead.  One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell.  At last they realized that it could not be done—­later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier’s winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened.  Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns were in place; they knew what they had to face.  One man spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.

“A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!” said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through.  Oh, these English!  They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.

It was not the first time the guns had not “connected up” for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate.  Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm.  They did not make excuses.  Success is the criterion of battle.  They had failed.  Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness.  One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought.  Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.