only feel the horror and wickedness of war.  Indeed it is an evil harvest, sown of pride and arrogance and lust of power.  Maybe through all this evil and pain we shall be purged of many sins.  God grant it!  If ever there were martyrs, some of these were martyrs, facing death and torture as ghastly as any that confronted the saints of old, and facing it with but little of that fierce fanatical exaltation of faith that the early Christians had to help them.

For these were mostly quiet souls, loving their wives and children and the little comforts of home life most of all, little stirred by great emotions or passions.  Yet they had some love for liberty, some faith in God,—­not a high and flaming passion, but a quiet insistent conviction.  It was enough to send them out to face martyrdom, though their lack of imagination left them mercifully ignorant of the extremity of its terrors.  It was enough, when they saw their danger in its true perspective, to keep them steadfast and tenacious.

For them “it is finished.” R.I.P.

V

ROMANCE

I suppose that there are very few officers or men who have been at the front for any length of time who would not be secretly, if not openly, relieved and delighted if they “got a cushy one” and found themselves en route for “Blighty”; yet in many ways soldiering at the front is infinitely preferable to soldiering at home.  One of the factors which count most heavily in favour of the front, is the extraordinary affection of officers for their men.

In England, officers hardly know their men.  They live apart, only meet on parade, and their intercourse is carried on through the prescribed channels.  Even if you do get keen on a particular squad of recruits, or a particular class of would-be bombers, you lose them so soon that your enthusiasm never ripens into anything like intimacy.  But at the front you have your own platoon; and week after week, month after month, you are living in the closest proximity; you see them all day, you get to know the character of each individual man and boy, and the result in nearly every case is this extraordinary affection of which I have spoken.

You will find it in the most unlikely subjects.  I have heard a Major, a Regular with, as I thought, a good deal of regimental stiffness, talk about his men with a voice almost choked with emotion.  “When you see what they have to put up with, and how amazingly cheery they are through it all, you feel that you can’t do enough for them.  They make you feel that you’re not fit to black their boots.”  And then he went on to tell how it was often the fellows whom in England you had despaired of, fellows who were always “up at orders,” who out at the front became your right-hand men, the men on whom you found yourself relying.