Those apparently irresponsible subalterns whom you see entertaining their lady friends at the Canton or Ciro’s do, when they are at the front, have very heavy responsibilities.  Even in the ordinary routine of trench life, so many decisions have to be made, with the chance of a “telling off” whichever way you choose, and the lives of other men hanging in the balance.  Suppose you are detailed for a wiring party, and you arrive to find a full moon beaming sardonically down at you.  What are you to do?  If you go out you may be seen.  Half a dozen of your men may be mown down by a machine gun.  You will be blamed and will blame yourself for not having decided to remain behind the parapet.  If you do not go out you may set a precedent, and night after night the work will be postponed, till at last it is too late, and the Hun has got through, and raided the trench.  If you hesitate or ask advice you are lost.  You have to make up your mind in an instant, and to stand by it.  If you waver your men will never have confidence in you again.

Still more in a push; a junior subaltern is quite likely to find himself at any time in command of a company, while he may for a day even have to command the relics of a battalion.  I have seen boys almost fresh from a Public School in whose faces there were two personalities expressed:  the one full of the lighthearted, reckless, irresponsible vitality of boyhood, and the other scarred with the anxious lines of one to whom a couple of hundred exhausted and nerve-shattered men have looked, and not looked in vain, for leadership and strength in their grim extremity.  From a boy in such a position is required something far more difficult than personal courage.  If we praise the boy soldier for his smile in the face of shells and machine guns, don’t let us forget to praise still more the boy officer who, in addition to facing death on his own account, has to bear the responsibility of the lives of a hundred other men.  There is many a man of undoubted courage whose nerve would fail to bear that strain.

A day or two ago I was reading Romance, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer.  It is a glorious tale of piracy and adventure in the West Indies; but for the moment I wondered how it came about that Conrad, the master of psychology, should have helped to write such a book.  And then I understood.  For these boys who hate the war, and suffer and endure with the smile that is sometimes so difficult, and long with a great longing for home and peace—­some day some of them will look back on these days and will tell themselves that after all it was Romance, the adventure, which made their lives worth while.  And they will long to feel once again the stirring of the old comradeship and love and loyalty, to dip their clasp-knives into the same pot of jam, and lie in the same dug-out, and work on the same bit of wire with the same machine gun striking secret terror into their hearts, and look into each other’s eyes for the same courageous smile.  For Romance, after all, is woven of the emotions, especially the elemental ones of love and loyalty and fear and pain.