Our next journey took us to the greatest training camp in the allied part of the world.  It is not the largest camp, of course.  It accommodates less than twenty thousand soldiers.  But it is what might be called the post graduate college of all training camps.  Here ten thousand men come every week from other training camps all over the earth, and are given intensive training.  For six days, eighteen and twenty hours a day, these soldiers, trained by many months’ labour on other fields, are given the Ph.D. in battle lore, and are turned out the seventh day after a Saturday night lecture on hate, and shot straight up to the front.  In all France there is no more grisly place for the weak-stomached man than this training camp—­not even the front line trenches will kick up his gorge more sedulously.  Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough.  One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, and in the ten thousand acre plain one sees horse-men galloping, soldiers running, great trucks and tanks lumbering over the field; men digging, men throwing hand-grenades, men clambering over trench walls, stumbling over crater holes, men doing all the innumerable things that are learned by those who carry on the handicraft of war.

But when one starts with the first class and goes along through the day’s work with it, the deadly seriousness of the training gets to him.  The first thing the first class does is to gather around a sergeant major, who in a few simple words tells his pupils how to use the bayonet.  Then they go out and use the bayonet as he has taught them.  Then the pupils gather around another sergeant major, who tells them how to use the hand-grenade or the knife or the butt of a gun, and the simple-hearted lads go out and use the grenade, the knife, or the butt of the gun.  At length they are taken to a part of the ground where some trenches are sunken in the earth.  Before the trenches are barbed wire entanglements and deep jagged shell craters.  The imitation enemy trenches badly bombed by barrage lie twenty rods beyond.  The men are taken in hand by the amiable sergeant major and taught to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, to simulate the most murderous passion, and the simulation of a husky youth in his twenties of a murderous passion is realistic enough to make your flesh creep; for the very simulation produces the passion, as every wise man’s son doth know.  Then the youths are lined up in the trench, and numbered “one-two; one-two; one-two”; clear down the trench.  Then the order is given to go over the top.  Every gun rattles on the trench-top, and the second lieutenant goes over.  In the English papers the list of dead begins “Second lieutenant, unless otherwise designated.”  And in the war zone the second lieutenants are known as “The suicides’ club.”  Well, the second lieutenants get on top, and, down in the trench, number one hands his leg to number two; clear down the line; number two boosts number one to the top, then number