men whom I have taught and loved.”  The orthodox Christian “will be familiar with that thought of One who loved you dying for you.  I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent, something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for me.  That is the sort of community we now are—­a community in which one man dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and quarrels, we are brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with blood.  It is for us these men are dying—­for the women, the old men, and the rejected men—­and to preserve civilisation and the common life which we are keeping alive, or building.”

So much for the richer and the educated class.  As to the rank and file, the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or shell fire, is practically invariable.  Not the conscript soldiers of a military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce familiar from childhood!  Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonderful their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business.  “I do not find it easy,” writes a chaplain at the front who knows his men and has shared all the dangers of their life—­“to give incidents and sayings.  I could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle.  How many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others before themselves!  I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his intrenching tool, a little trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers’ fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and rescue came.  Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are never known.  Indeed it is the heroism of all the men all the time which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen months at the war.  No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men.  They never show the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when and where they are told without questioning; no matter what the conditions or dangers, they come up smiling and cheery through it all—­full of ‘grouse,’ perhaps, but that is the soldier’s privilege!...  It is, I think, what we all are feeling and are so