But it isn’t always quite as comforting as that.  The servant of a friend of mine, a young subaltern in the Black Watch, whom, alas! like so many other friends, I shall never see again, in describing the church parade held after the battle of Loos, in which his master was killed by a shell, wrote that when the chaplain gave out the hymn “Rock of Ages” the men burst into tears, their voices failed them, and they broke down utterly.  And I remember that on one occasion when some four-fifths of the officers of a certain battalion had gone down in the advance, and the shaken remnant fell back upon their trenches, deafened and distraught, one of the officers—­he had been a master in a great public school before the war—­took out of his pocket a copy of the Faerie Queene, and began in a slow, even voice to read the measured cadences of one of its cantos, and, having read, handed it to a subaltern and asked him to follow suit.  The others listened, half in wonder, half in fear, thinking he had lost his senses, but there was method in his madness and a true inspiration.  The musical rhythm of the words distracted their terrible memories, and soon acted like a charm upon their disordered nerves.

     And on his breast a bloody cross he bore,
     The dear remembrance of his dying Lord,
     For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
     And dead (as living) ever him adored: 
     Upon his shield the like was also scored,
     For sovereign hope, which in his help he had: 
     Right faithful true he was in deed and word;
     But of his cheer did seem too solemn sad: 
     Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

Clusters of men in billets; men doing a route-march to keep them fit; Indian cavalry jogging along on the footpath with lances in rest; herds of tethered horses in rest-camps; a string of motor-buses painted a khaki-tint; a “mobile” (a travelling workshop) with its dynamo humming like a top and the mechanics busy upon the lathe; an Army Postal van coming along, like a friend in need, to tow my car, stranded in the mud, with a long cable; sappers, like Zaccheus, up a tree (but not metaphorically); despatch-riders whizzing past at sixty miles an hour—­these are familiar sights of the lines of communication, and they lend a variety to the monotonous countryside without which it would be dull indeed.  For it is a countryside of interminable straight lines—­straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema’s landscapes without their colouring.  But to the south of the zone of our occupation, as you leave G.H.Q. for the Base, you exchange these plains of sticky clay and stagnant dykes for a pleasant country of undulating downs and noble beech woods, and one seems to shake off a nightmare of damp despondency.

It may be remarked that I have said nothing of Ypres.  The explanation is painfully simple.  Ypres has ceased to exist.  It is merely a heap of stones, and the trilithons on Salisbury Plain are not more desolate.