I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face and steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and thinking.  We looked at one another.  There are moments when mind leaps to mind.  It is natural for the man in the trenches suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as a middle-aged civilian with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself something of a spectacle and something generalised.  It is natural for the civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, “Well, how do you take it?” As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect of mutual understanding.  And we said with our nods just exactly what General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the hand and what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner; we said to each other that here was the trouble those Germans had brought upon us and here was the task that had to be done.

Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob; with a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet, a queer little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year or so before the war, you would most certainly have pronounced Chinese.  He belonged to a Northumbrian battalion; it does not matter exactly which.  As we returned from this front line, trudging along the winding path through the barbed wire tangles before the smashed and captured German trench that had been taken a fortnight before, I fell behind my guardian captain and had a brief conversation wit this individual.  He was a lad in the early twenties, weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes.  He was, he told me, a miner.  I asked my stock question in such cases, whether he would go back to the old work after the war.  He said he would, and then added—­with the events of overnight on his mind:  “If A’hm looky.”

Followed a little silence.  Then I tried my second stock remark for such cases.  One does not talk to soldiers at the front in this war of Glory or the “Empire on which the sun never sets” or “the meteor flag of England” or of King and Country or any of those fine old headline things.  On the desolate path that winds about amidst the shell craters and the fragments and the red-rusted wire, with the silken shiver of passing shells in the air and the blue of the lower sky continually breaking out into eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such panoplies of the effigy appear.  We knew that we and our allies are upon a greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of thing now.  We are very near the waking point.

“Well,” I said, “it’s got to be done.”

“Aye,” he said, easing the strap of his rifle a little; “it’s got to be done.”

THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)

I. THE ISONZO FRONT

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