and now and then the chance of being knocked over by a bullet or piece of shell, just as you might be struck by lightning.”  That is the real philosophy of the soldier.  “After all, we are may-be as safe here as you are in Piccadilly,” says another; and when men have come unhurt out of infinite danger they grow sublimely fatalistic and cheerful.  An officer in the Cavalry Division, for instance, writes:  “I am coming back all right, never fear.  Have been in such tight corners and under such fire that if I were meant to go I should have gone by now, I’m sure.”  And it is the same with the men.  “Having gone through six battles without a scratch,” says Private A. Sunderland, of Bolton, “I thought I would never be hit.”  Later on, however, he was wounded.

Though the artillery fire has proved most destructive to all ranks, by far the worst ordeal of the troops was the long retreat in the early stages of the war.  It exhausted and exasperated the men.  They grew angry and impatient.  None but the best troops in the world, with a profound belief in the judgment and valor of their officers, could have stood up against it.  A statement by a driver of the Royal Field Artillery, published in the Evening News, gives a vivid impression of how the men felt.  “I have no clear notion of the order of events in the long retreat,” he says; “it was a nightmare, like being seized by a madman after coming out of a serious illness and forced towards the edge of a precipice.”  The constant marching, the want of sleep, the restless and (as it sometimes seemed to the men) purposeless backward movement night and day drove them into a fury.  The intensity of the warfare, the fierce pressure upon the mental and physical powers of endurance, might well have exercised a mischievous effect upon the men.  Instead, however, it only brought out their finest qualities.

In an able article in Blackwood’s Magazine, on “Moral Qualities in War,” Major C.A.L.  Yate, of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, dealt with the “intensity” of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience.  “Under such conditions,” he wrote, “marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible.  An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy state of mind which the term moral implies.”  It is just that moral which the British Expeditionary Force has been proved to possess in so rich a measure, and which must belong to all good soldiers in these days of nerve-shattering war.