And then I thought of what I had seen only a few days before.  First, of battalions of men marching in the darkness, steadily and in step, towards the roar of the guns; destined in the next twelve hours to charge as one man, without hesitation or doubt, through barrages of cruel shell and storms of murderous bullets.  Then, the following afternoon, of a handful of men, all that was left of about three battalions after ten hours of fighting, a handful of men exhausted, parched, strained, holding on with grim determination to the last bit of German trench, until they should receive the order to retire.  And lastly, on the days and nights following, of the constant streams of wounded and dead being carried down the trench; of the unceasing search that for three or four days was never fruitless.

Self-realization!  How far we have travelled from the ideals of those pre-war days.  And as I thought things over I wondered at how faint a response that phrase, “I loathe militarism in all its forms,” found in my own mind.

Before the war I too hated “militarism.”  I despised soldiers as men who had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.  The sight of the Guards drilling in Wellington Barracks, moving as one man to the command of their drill instructor, stirred me to bitter mirth.  They were not men but manikins.  When I first enlisted, and for many months afterwards, the “mummeries of military discipline,” the saluting, the meticulous uniformity, the rigid suppression of individual exuberance, chafed and infuriated me.  I compared it to a ritualistic religion, a religion of authority only, which depended not on individual assent but on tradition for its sanctions.  I loathed militarism in all its forms.  Now ... well, I am inclined to reconsider my judgment.  Seeing the end of military discipline, has shown me something of its ethical meaning—­more than that, of its spiritual meaning.

For though the part of the “great push” that it fell to my lot to see was not a successful part, it was none the less a triumph—­a spiritual triumph.  From the accounts of the ordinary war correspondent I think one hardly realizes how great a spiritual triumph it was.  For the war correspondent only sees the outside, and can only describe the outside of things.  We who are in the Army, who know the men as individuals, who have talked with them, joked with them, censored their letters, worked with them, lived with them we see below the surface.

The war correspondent sees the faces of the men as they march towards the Valley of the Shadow, sees the steadiness of eye and mouth, hears the cheery jest.  He sees them advance into the Valley without flinching.  He sees some of them return, tired, dirty, strained, but still with a quip for the passer-by.  He gives us a picture of men without nerves, without sensitiveness, without imagination, schooled to face death as they would face rain or any trivial incident of everyday life.  The “Tommy” of