At last we sighted our objective, a cluster of chalk mounds surrounded with broken wire, shell craters, corpses, wreathed in smoke, dotted with men.  I think we all ran across the ground between our front line and our objective, though it must have been more or less dead ground.  Anyhow, only one man was hit.  When we got close the scene was absurdly like a conventional battle picture—­the sort of picture that one never believes in for a minute.  There was a wild mixture of regiments—­Jocks, Irishmen, Territorials, etc., etc.  There was no proper trench left.  There were rifles, a machine gun, a Lewis rifle, and bombs all going at the same time.  There were wounded men sitting in a kind of helpless stupor; there were wounded trying to drag themselves back to our own lines; there were the dead of whom no one took any notice.  But the prevailing note was one of utter weariness coupled with dogged tenacity.

Here and there were men who were self-conscious, wondering what would become of themselves.  I was one of them, and we were none the better for it.  Most of the fellows, though, had forgotten themselves.  They no longer flinched, or feared.  They had got beyond that.  They were just set on clinging to that mound and keeping the Huns at bay until their officer gave the word to retire.  Their spirit was the spirit of the oarsman, the runner, or the footballer, who has strained himself to the utmost, who if he stopped to wonder whether he could go on or not would collapse; but who, because he does not stop to wonder, goes on miraculously long after he should, by all the laws of nature, have succumbed to sheer exhaustion.

Having delivered my bombs into eager hands, I reported to the officer who seemed to be in charge, and asked if I could do anything.  I must frankly admit that my one hope was that he would not want me to stay.  He began to say how that morning he had reached his objective, and how for lack of support on his flank, for lack of bombs, for lack of men, he had been forced back; and how for eight hours he had disputed every inch of ground till now his men could only cling to these mounds with the dumb mechanical tenacity of utter exhaustion.  “You might go to H.Q.,” he said at last, “and tell them where I am, and that I can’t hold on without ammunition and a barrage.”

I am afraid that I went with joy on that errand.  I did not want to stay on those chalk mounds.

* * * * *

I only saw a very little bit of the battle.  Thank God it has gone well elsewhere; but here we are where we started.  Day and night we have done nothing but bring in the wounded and the dead.  When one sees the dead, their limbs crushed and mangled, their features distorted and blackened, one can only have repulsion for war.  It is easy to talk of glory and heroism when one is away from it, when memory has softened the gruesome details.  But here, in the presence of the mutilated and tortured dead, one can