One notices this approximation of type in the higher ranks, and many of the juniors are cut out of the very same cloth as ours.  They get whatever fun may be going:  their performances are as incredible and outrageous as the language in which they describe them afterward is bald, but convincing, and—­I overheard the tail-end of a yarn told by a child of twenty to some other babes.  It was veiled in the obscurity of the French tongue, and the points were lost in shouts of laughter —­but I imagine the subaltern among his equals displays just as much reverence for his elders and betters as our own boys do.  The epilogue, at least, was as old as both Armies: 

“And what did he say then?”

“Oh, the usual thing.  He held his breath till I thought he’d burst.  Then he damned me in heaps, and I took good care to keep out of his sight till next day.”

But officially and in the high social atmosphere of Headquarters their manners and their meekness are of the most admirable.  There they attend devoutly on the wisdom of their seniors, who treat them, so it seemed, with affectionate confidence.

FRONT THAT NEVER SLEEPS

When the day’s reports are in, all along the front, there is a man, expert in the meaning of things, who boils them down for that cold official digest which tells us that “There was the usual grenade fighting at------.  We made appreciable advance at------,” &c.  The original material comes in sheaves and sheaves, where individual character and temperament have full and amusing play.  It is reduced for domestic consumption like an overwhelming electric current.  Otherwise we could not take it in.  But at closer range one realizes that the Front never sleeps; never ceases from trying new ideas and weapons which, so soon as the Boche thinks he has mastered them, are discarded for newer annoyances and bewilderments.

“The Boche is above all things observant and imitative,” said one who counted quite a few Boches dead on the front of his sector.  “When you present him with a new idea, he thinks it over for a day or two.  Then he presents his riposte.”

“Yes, my General.  That was exactly what he did to me when I —­did so and so.  He was quite silent for a day.  Then—­he stole my patent.”

“And you?”

“I had a notion that he’d do that, so I had changed the specification.”

Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is among the junior commands, down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on their own, through unbelievable adventures.  They are inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the single ideal—­to kill—­which they follow with men as single-minded as themselves.  Battlefield tactics do not exist; when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the “victories” of the old bookish days.  But there is always the killing—­the well-schemed smashing of