CHAPTER XTHE COMRADESHIP OF THE TRENCHES
“All the bright company of HeavenHold him in their high comradeship,The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,Orion’s Belt and sworded hip ...Through joy and blindness he shall know,Not caring much to know, that stillNor lead nor shell shall reach him, soThat it be not the Destined Will.”(“Into Battle,” by Captain Julian Grenfell, killed in action, Ypres, May, 1915.)
The firing-line is the touchstone of character. It is the final instance. There is no appeal beyond it. A man may have shown himself at home to be the best of officers, self-possessed, self-reliant, conscientious, thoughtful for his men; but half an hour’s “frightfulness” at the front can undo the good impression made in months of home training. A good sergeant will relieve an officer of a great deal of routine in ordinary circumstances, but when the company comes under fire the sergeant will, like the men, lean unconsciously on the moral strength of the officer.
No man can hope to be eternally master of his nerves. Modern shell-fire wears the nerves away. A man who would lead his platoon fearlessly into the jaws of hell may feel himself inwardly cringing whenhe hears the long high whistle of a shell, mingling with the ominous hiss that means it is nearing the end of its journey. But if a man is what the army calls “a good officer,” the first thought that will rise to the surface in him when he comes under fire is, “The men.”
He will know that, almost automatically, the men are watching him to see what he will do. Be they the toughest of veterans, and he the greenest of “subs.,” there is always a subconscious disposition in the soldier under fire to mould himself on the example given by an officer. An officer who is always exhorting his men to be careful (and by this I do not mean the officer who takes sensible measures to check the irrepressible foolhardiness of the British soldier under fire), who indulges in exaggerated demonstrations of horror when a shell shatters a man to fragments at his very elbow, will “rot” the finest company. The men will begin to think before they act, and in consequence lose that singleness of purpose that takes the soldier straight to his appointed goal, that makes just the difference between good and bad troops.
The firing-line is a strange place. There are few situations in life where a man is called upon to hold himself permanently in check. There are emergencies in civil life where a man must subordinate his feelings to a higher interest, but only in war is he compelled to make the perpetual sacrifice of his feelings, to face again and again an ordeal which perhaps never loses its terrors for him.
Do you realize the weight of responsibility resting on the shoulders of the Regimental Officer in war?Here is a situation he is frequently called upon to face. A shell falls right into the midst of his platoon as he is leading his men to or from the trenches. Maybe the men are fresh from home, and this sudden horror that cleaves its bloody path through their ranks is their first taste of war.
There is one man in that platoon who must not lose his head. That is the officer, boy though he be. Those raw and mangled corpses, those groaning, whimpering men that strew the ground, may affright the rank and file; they may make no visible impression on him. In his hands repose the lives of a couple of hundred men. He owes them not only to those men themselves, but to the State. He must maintain his calm, so that the men shall come to see with him that this is but a common incident of war; he must decide whether to put the men under cover or to march straight on; he must collect the survivors, and form them up again; he must, in short, take command for the moment, not only of his own feelings, but of those of his men as well. Though a senseless terror, which highly strung men who come under shell-fire for the first time know all too well, creep over him, he must not show it. He must play the veteran, though the heavens fall in.
The whole relationship between officer and man in our army is based on incidents like these. To get the best out of his men, an officer must show them that he does not fear to do what he demands of them. Seldom, if ever, is a stout-hearted officer “let down.” His example endures, even after he is gone. More than once, I am sure, the souls of our officers, slain inbattle, have paused, as they winged their way homewards, to contemplate with pride their men, their officers all dead, holding on in an obliterated trench, sustained in their resolution by the lesson their dead leaders taught them.
On countless occasions in this war the teachings of the Regimental Officer have borne fruit, even after he himself had joined the great majority. In the assault on Neuve Chapelle in March the leading companies of the 1st 39th Garhwalis lost all their officers in the first ten minutes. But the brave little Nepalese hillmen never wavered. They had seen their officers die at the head of their companies. They remembered ... and it kept them firm. In the same historic fight the Scottish Rifles lost all their officers save one, Lieutenant Somervail, a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. But the men of this splendid regiment, whose tradition is that there shall be no surrender, went on behind their non-commissioned officers, despite heavy losses, against barbed wire and machine-guns, “moulding themselves,” as their regimental sergeant-major said to me afterwards, “on the glorious example of their officers.” When we recaptured at Hooge on August 9 the positions we lost on July 30, a party of twenty-five men of the 2nd Durham light Infantry, under the command of Lance-Corporal Smith, were lost in the dense smoke of battle, and held out alone in an obliterated trench for more than twenty-four hours, without orders, without connection with the rest of the troops, and only came away when they saw a fresh line being dug behind the line they were holding. The officers of this fine battalionhad created in their men’s minds the proper idea of the functions of an officer, so that, when there were no officers left to lead, this young lance-corporal stepped forward and “carried on” in the best traditions of the service.
In the firing-line you get down to bedrock. Character tells. The cult is of the “stout fellow,” the “thruster.” The men will vaguely admire the clever strategy of their Generals which enabled the soldier to sing:
“We gave them hellAt Neuve Chapelle.Here we are again!”
But their outspoken praise of any one General will always be traceable back to qualities of personal bravery that he has displayed. If they admire and respect Sir John French, it is because they recall him on the South African veld, because they remember him sitting on the roadside with them among the shells during the retreat from Mons. If they think a world of Sir Douglas Haig, it is likewise because they have seen him in the midst of his men on many critical occasions, not forgetting that historic afternoon in the first battle of Ypres, when the Commander-in-Chief and Sir Douglas Haig, waiting at Hooge, heard the news that the Germans had broken our line, and later that the 2nd Worcesters had saved the day. In present circumstances practically the only Generals that come into direct contact with the men are the Brigadiers, and I have found that the Brigadiers who are the best loved are those who are constantly making the round of the trenches, who showthe men that they are willing to expose themselves to the same perils as they ask the men to incur.
I have been on many a long round of trenches with the Brigadiers through mud and water and evil smells, along roads in view of the Germans where bullets sang and snapped, across fields where shells were plumping, right up to the firing-line, where “whizz-bangs” were demolishing the parapet. I have often found myself admiring the physical endurance and the calm courage of these Brigadiers—who are not all young men—and have read the reflection of my own thought in the eyes of the men in the trenches who saluted as we passed.
It is in the firing-line that the relationship between officer and man, which it has taken so many decades to build up in the British Army, comes to full fruition. Its essence is the spirit of the playground. I am sure that the British officer is to his men, more than anything else, the captain of the team. The game is stern, the stakes are high, but the spirit is the old one: “Buck up! and play the game!”
Officer and man live together in closer companionship than ever was possible before they entered the firing-line. Their bond of mutual confidence is sealed by a thousand recollections of dangers faced together, of assaults side by side against the enemy, of perilous patrols at night. The daily tragedies of the trenches unite them still closer, drawing them together as men sleeping in the open will huddle up for warmth.
A young Captain was in his dug-out in the trenches one day, when word came back to him that one of his men had been sniped. He hurried out and along thetrench to the spot indicated. As he came to a traverse, a man sprang out of a “funk-hole.” “Don’t go round there, sir,” he said; “there’s a sniper watching that traverse. He’s just got one of the men.” In a feeling of spontaneous sympathy the young officer went on. As he rounded the traverse in sight of his man, who had just expired on the floor of the trench, the sniper’s rifle cracked again, and the officer collapsed with a bullet through the body.
There was no doctor in the trench at the time. The wounded man’s comrades, who examined him, found that he had been shot through the abdomen. The only chance of life was to leave him where he lay. So, while a message was sent down for the doctor, his men built a shelter over him in the open trench.
Food or drink are fatal in the case of grave internal wounds like this. The wounded man was racked with thirst, but all they could do was to moisten his lips from time to time with a damp handkerchief. The men in his company went about their duties with set faces, for, one and all, they loved their Captain. His servant was in despair, and watched him in his shelter. His best friend in the regiment, the Captain of another company, sat with him until evening, when he had to go to take his company back into reserve.
That night the wounded man died. One who saw him laid to rest in the little burial-ground of the battalion by a ruined farm says the grief of his men at the graveside was poignant to witness. When the dead man first took over the company it was slack and unruly, the worst company in the battalion.The new man who succeeded him told me it was the best company he had ever seen, for the spirit of the dead officer was living in every man. Such are the relations of officer and man; such are the little dramas that keep friendship green in our army in the field.
The British soldier’s indifference to danger, while it is one of his finest qualities, is often the despair of his officer. The Irish regiments are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial. An officer in one of the Irish battalions—he was a “ranker,” and therefore knew his subject—told me some amazing instances of the complete indifference of his men to the dangers of their situation. Crossing a railway on one occasion, in full view of the Germans, he came upon a party of men engaged in setting up bottles along the line. To his vigorous inquiry as to what they were doing, they disingenuously replied that they were setting up targets to shoot at from an angle of the trench! If the Germans had turned on a machine-gun down the line, not one of those men would have escaped alive.
I have had more than one experience myself of the British soldier’s indifference to danger. When I was going up to some trenches in the Ypres salient one day, the guide, a particularly stolid-looking private, stopped suddenly on a road and said: “Will you go by the road or the trench, sir?” Of course, I had not the least choice, not knowing the ground, so I asked him which was the shorter way. “The road’s a long way the shorter,” he replied. So we went by the road. But when I told the officers up at the mess in the trenches that I had come by that road they stared, and asked if we had been shelled. I said wehad not. Then they told me that that particular stretch of road was one of the most “unhealthy” spots in the neighbourhood by day.
The guide was interrogated. “Some takes the road, and some the trench,” he said. “But don’t you know they are always shelling that road?” the officer asked. “They do put one over now and again,” the man replied, “but the road’s a deal shorter, sir!” “You’ll find it a short-cut to heaven one of these days, if you go on using that road,” the officer said, whereat the man grinned broadly.
The relationship between courage and discretion is always a difficult thing in war. Many lives have been lost, I fear, in this war because officers, particularly those new to the game, would not take cover when a shell came over, lest they might appear “rattled.” In point of fact, a man may often escape a wound, or perhaps even save his life, by taking refuge in a dug-out or seeking refuge behind a tree or a wall, when he hears by the diminishing speed of a shell that it is about to burst in his neighbourhood.
A very few weeks in the field, however, makes most men fatalistic about shell-fire—a man sees so often that life and death hang on a fraction of a second, on a foot this way or that. Going up to trenches one afternoon with two companions in a particularly lively part of our line, we had to cross a little bridge over a ditch. Twenty yards from this bridge was a dug-out in which the headquarters of the battalion I had come to visit was situated. I had just reached the dug-out, when I heard the slow drone of a shell. As I turned towards the direction from which thesound came the shell burst square over the bridge we had crossed less than a minute before, and two other shells fell close by within a few seconds. With the utmost satisfaction, I must admit, I dwelt on the thought that, if I had delayed for a minute to fasten a boot-lace or to light a cigarette, I should in all probability have been on that bridge just when those three shells burst there.
Two officers were following one another in cars through a ruined village close behind our lines. At the end of the village they were stopped by a military policeman, who warned them that the road was being shelled. The officer in the leading car decided that he would wait for the “strafing” to cease; the other, who was in a hurry, proceeded to his destination by another route. On arriving he found a telephone message to say that the first car had been struck square by a shell a few minutes after he had left, and that the officer and his chauffeur had been killed on the spot.
The rivet that holds the regimental officers together, their common solicitude as their common pride, are the men. The officer in the trenches is thinking continually of the men, of their safety, of their comfort, of their health, of their behaviour under fire. Get an officer talking about a “show,” and he will never tire of telling you how well the men behaved, how Private This is a most “gallant feller,” and Private That, “my best bomber,” died. “The men did d—— well,” “The men were splendid.” How often have I heard phrases like these!
Pride in their officers, pride in their regiment, flashesout quaintly in the men’s talk. Listen to a group of soldiers describing a fight.
“The Captain ’e says....” “Lieutenant Blank ups with his rifle quick-like....” “The Major? ’E’s a fair nut, ’e is. First over the parapet ’e was, and going that fast that, what with the bombs you ’ave round you, and them you carry in a box, we couldn’t ’ardly keep up with ’im!”
This is a sergeant-major on the death of his Colonel:
“Yes, sir,” he says in his deep, slow voice, “our Colonel was hit, the best soldier that ever commanded this battalion. He was a grand man. ‘Sergeant-major,’ he says to me, ‘sergeant-major, I’m just going up to have a look round.’ Well, he didn’t come back. Then a man coming down, wounded, says in a great fuss: ‘Sergeant-major, it’s something awful up there. The Colonel’s killed,’ he says, ‘and the Adjutant, too!’ ‘You’ve got the wind up, my man,’ I said to the chap, not believing him. ‘You run along to the dressing-station and get your head bound up. You haven’t any brains to spare, remember.’ But, all the same, I went up to see for myself what was happening. It was true, sure enough. There was the Colonel, mortal bad he was, and the Adjutant killed. Ah, he was a grand gentleman, our Colonel! There were not many like him, sir! We could ill spare him!”
When you have seen officers and men together in the trenches you understand Francis Grenfell’s dying words: “Tell them I died happy. I loved my squadron.” Those noble words are the epitome of the lifework of the Regimental Officer.
Out of this close friendship between officer andman springs a great spirit ofcamaraderiebetween officers in the trenches. It is no small test of character for a group of men of different stations, ages, and dispositions to live in the closest possible association, as men do in the trenches, for days at a time, and never to fail to display that mutual forbearance and readiness to serve which help men over the rough paths of life. During the months I have been at the front I have been privileged, at different times, to see a great deal of officers together in the trenches. I have spent nights with them in their dug-outs; I have had various meals with them at their messes; I have accompanied them on their rounds. What has struck me more than anything has been the real spirit of co-operation existing between them. This takes the form not only of the sharing of the minor comforts of life, such as the pooling of gifts sent out from home—which was only to be expected—but of a continual striving to help one another, to render one another small services in their duties, to cover up, if needs be, one another’s shortcomings, and, above all, to make things smooth for the new man.
On the other hand, active service appears to accentuate inter-regimental rivalry. Trenches are a great theme for criticism. Theremaybe a battalion in our army in the field to-day that has given a written testimony to the troops from which it has “taken over” of the splendid condition in which the trenches were left. If there is, I have not found it. The relieving battalionalwaysroundly abuses its predecessor for the state of the trenches. In every trench I have been in I have been shown with pride the improvementsmade by the actual tenants: “You should have seen the state of things those bloody fellows in the Blankshires left behind!...” I once heard the Commander of the Second Army get in a sly dig at a brigade on parade regarding this inevitable trench criticism. It was a very human touch in a formal address, and evoked broad smiles from the audience, both officers and men.
Nothing could be more charming than the atmosphere of a trench mess. The Colonel is back at the battalion headquarters with the Adjutant, so that the senior officer present is the Captain in command of the company holding the particular section of trench, or at most a Major. The rest of the company at table will consist of two or three subalterns, the machine-gun officer, possibly the doctor, and sometimes the Chaplain. The “Padre” is, properly speaking, attached to the Field Ambulance, but one often meets these gallant men in the firing-line, making their tour of the men under their charge as conscientiously as the Captain makes his round of his trenches.
You must picture the company seated on rough benches or ammunition-boxes (here and there one finds a chair salved from a wrecked farm) round a makeshift table, knocked together by the orderlies, with sheets of newspaper in lieu of a tablecloth. Most of the food is put on the table at once—sardines in an enamel soup-plate, cold tongue ditto, ration bread (rather mouldy if we are in an isolated post), some kind of hot meat on an enamel dish, and enamel cups for drinks. The conversation is sprightly, mostly of the events of the day. The presence of the “Padre” curbs the freedom of the language to someextent, though, Heaven knows, he, poor man, has already discovered that the army swears terribly in Flanders. “I can stand a good deal,” a “Padre” said to me one day, “but I draw the line firmly at some words.”
This imperturbable young man with the shaven head and the yellow moustache, whose dinner is being continually interrupted by gruff voices issuing from the darkness at the door of the dug-out, “Can I speak to the Captain?” “A message for the Captain!” “About those blankets for the men, sir ...” is responsible for the safety of this stretch of trench and its tenants. He transacts his business through the door of the dug-out and eats his dinner at the same time, always tranquilly. The hole in the back of his tunic is a souvenir of a piece of high-explosive shell in the shoulder, and the cut in the knee of his trousers is due to the same cause. A boy with yellow hair and pink cheeks, who is talking telescopic rifles with the doctor, is Lord of the Hate Squad—in other words, in charge of the snipers. Only that afternoon I had seen him, with a companion, amid bullets snapping viciously against a ruined wall, patiently waiting for a certain sniping Hun whose habitat was in a tree. He had not got him that day, but the Hate Squad had their eye on the sniper, and sooner or later his number would go up.
A burst of laughter from the other end of the table greets a story told with infinite gusto by the machine-gun officer, a phlegmatic young man with the ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic. He knows German well, and one of his amusements is to revile theGermans in their own tongue. He is recounting some of the epithets he applies to them.
Our army in the field has managed to scrape together a whole vocabulary of trench slang. It is a strange medley of English, French, and German. That immortal phrase “Gott strafe England” has given to trench slang “strafing” as a substantive, and “to straf” as a verb. As you have probably already gathered from reading soldiers’ letters in the newspapers, to be “strafed” is to be bombarded by the enemy—in short, to suffer in any way at the hands of the Hun. The morning and evening “straf” is equivalent to the morning and evening “frightfulness” or “hate,” the liveliness with which the German guns issue in the day and march it out at its close. The Germans apply the words “Morgengruss” (morning greeting) and “Abendsegen” (evening benediction) to these periodical outbursts from our side. “Hate,” used in this sense, undoubtedly owes its origin to that amusing sketch inPunch, showing a German family indulging in its “morning hate.” This clever cartoon had an immense vogue at the front, and I have seen it frequently hanging up on the walls of dug-outs and billets.
To be “crumped”—another expression often heard in the trenches—is to be bombarded with heavy howitzer shells, an onomatopœic word. To be “archied”—a Royal Flying Corps phrase—is to be shelled by anti-aircraft guns, which are universally known as “Archibalds” or “Archies.”
A whole vocabulary has grown up about the guns which are playing such a rôle in this war. “Gunning”is freely used as a synonym for “shelling”; the heavy guns are,tout court, “the heavies”; the howitzers are the “hows.” There is a wild and picturesque crop of nicknames to denote the different kinds of guns and shells. Thus, our heaviest howitzer is known as “Grandmother” or “Grandma,” while the next below it in size is “Mother.” A certain German long-range naval gun, whose shells have the peculiarity of bursting before you hear them arrive, is known as “Percy.” German high-explosive shrapnel shells are “white hopes” or “white swans.” “Jack Johnsons,” “Black Marias,” and “coal-boxes” are used rather indiscriminately for different kinds of heavy shells, while “whizz-bangs,” the small 15-pounder shell thrown by a mountain-gun, are also called “pip-squeaks.” The men in the firing-line got so free with their nicknames for shells in official reports at one time that a list of officially recognized and distinctive nicknames for German shells was drawn up and issued for use by some divisions.
From the French trench slang derives one or two expressions. “To function” (fonctionner) is one. A man “functions” as liaison officer, a trench-pump will not “function.” “Dégommer” is often used to denote the action of relieving an officer of his command. It is, of course, pure French slang, and is invariably used in this sense in the French Army. This word has a curious derivation. It was, I believe, first applied by theHumanitéin its old sledgehammer days under the late Jean Jaures, to denote Aristide Briand, most fiercely hated of all French Ministers because, at the outset of his career, he wasin the ranks of those revolutionary Socialists whom he had to combat so fiercely when in office. All public men who came under the ban of theHumanitéhad their nicknames, and were never referred to by anything else. Thus M. Lépine, the late Prefect of Police of Paris, was spoken of asle sinistre gnome, M. Clemenceau asLe Tigre, and M. Briand, after his fall from power as the result of his suppression of the railway strike, asLe Dégommé—“the ungummed one,” the innuendo being that he had clung to office until he was forcibly torn from power.
Talk at the trench mess, of course, principally turns round such trench topics as the men and their caprices, the date of relief, leave. There is “grousing” about the slowness of promotion, about the Mentions in Despatches. But there is no gloom. It is an eternal wonder to me that the officers in the trenches are so consistently cheerful. Neither death nor danger depresses their spirits; the monotony does not make them despondent. They do not hide the fact that they hate shell-fire, or that they could contemplate a more agreeable existence than living in a ditch in Flanders. Only they realize that they have a job to do, and they do it. And they will go on doing it until their work is done.
The Germans have realized too late what they have lost by sacrificing the respect of their enemies. Our soldiers in the trenches make no concealment of their admiration of the efficiency and bravery of the Germans as fighters, but as men they loathe and despise them. The British soldier is an easy-going fellow, and the Germans, had they only regarded the conventionsof soldiering, might have prevented much of the bitterness which this war has engendered. Even as it is, though the anger of our men against their treacherous enemy makes them a formidable and pitiless foe in the assault with the bayonet, they are gentle and paternal with their prisoners.
I have actually seen the British escort giving German prisoners cigarettes. I have read letters written by German prisoners waiting in our lines in France to be sent with a convoy to England, dwelling on the good treatment they were receiving, and describing how they were given the same rations as their escort, including cigarettes, and were being taught football by their captors. The extraordinaryagapesthat took place during the Christmas truce, when British and Germans, for a few brief hours, fraternized between the lines, could not, I believe, occur again, except possibly with the Saxons, who have behaved decently in this war, and for whom our men have a soft corner in their hearts. Since Christmas the hideous crime of the asphyxiating gas has drifted in a foul miasma between us and our enemy. No man who fought in the second battle of Ypres and saw the sufferings of the gas victims would give his hand to a German to-day. But the psychology of the British soldier is so enigmatic that the prophet would run grave risk of coming to grief who ventured to predict what the British soldier will do where his heart is concerned. Nevertheless, this much I would say—that to-day the British soldier neither fears nor trusts the German. He knows that, man for man, he is his superior; he looks forward to the timewhen, gun for gun and shell for shell, the same will be true.
German Prisoners.
“Daily Mail” phot.German Prisoners.
With the British and German lines in places only forty yards or less apart, there is always a certain amount of communication between ourselves and the enemy. The Germans generally contrive to find out which of our battalions is holding the trenches opposite, and often greet the reliefs with the name of their regiment. When a famous Highland battalion was going away, after a long stay in one portion of the line, the Germans played them out of the trenches with “Mary of Argyll,” very well rendered on the cornet. The Jocks were hugely amused, and gave the performer a round of applause to reward his efforts.
A large sheet of water which had formed about some shell-holes outside the trenches of the Rifle Brigade in the winter afforded both sides a great deal of amusement. One night a patrol found a rough wooden model of a German submarine floating in the pond, flying a paper flag on which were inscribed the words: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!” The submarine was “captured,” and for the next few days several handy fellows in the battalion of the R.B.’s holding the front line spent all their spare time in constructing a model battleship. This was subsequently launched at night flying a pennant with the words: “Why don’t you come out and fight?” A night or two after our patrols found that the pennant had been removed from the battleship, and replaced by a flag bearing the words: “Germania rules the waves!” In the meantime the battle of Heligoland was fought. The model was accordingly rescuedfrom the pond, suitably disfigured to represent a sinking ship, “Bluecher” painted in large letters on its side, and the flag replaced by one bearing these words: “Has your Government told you about this ship?” The blow told: the model disappeared, and the jest ended.
The exchange of news is very popular. I was in the front line one afternoon when a message arrived from the division announcing the surrender of German South-West Africa, and adding: “Perhaps the enemy might like to know this.”
The suggestion was immediately acted upon. The news was translated into German, “Gott strafe England!” was added to give it a proper German ring, and when I went down the men were painting the message in white on a large blackboard, which was going to be hoisted on the parapet facing the German trench. The Germans attacked this part of the line the next day, whether as the result of our message I am unable to say.
The high comradeship of our trenches is enhanced by many little touches redolent of home. The British soldier is a homing-bird, and he loves to perpetuate the memory of places that are dear to him in his surroundings in the trenches. The troops in the Ploegsteert lines—“Plug Street” of wide renown—who inaugurated the custom of giving street names to trenches with their “Strand” and “Fleet Street” and “Hyde Park Corner,” in reality hit upon a very practical solution of the great difficulty of providing suitable identification for the network of trenches which was growing up all along our lines. Now thecustom is general, and the neatly inscribed sign-boards which meet your eyes in so many parts of the line evoke recollections of busy streets and squares in London and provincial towns, and of gallant commanders, some of whom have “gone west,” whose names are perpetuated in countless “houses” and “corners” and “farms” along our line.
Since I came to France I have made it my business to visit the trenches in almost every part of the line. There are those who say: “When you have seen one trench, you have seen them all.” Of a truth, outwardly there is little enough difference between them all—the same swarm of dust-coloured figures, the same sandbags, the same timber-work, the same mud, the same strip of No Man’s Land ahead, the same devastation behind, the same noises echoing hollow all about. But to me each strip of trench is another corner of the great heart of Britain, where Britons of all stamps—the fair-haired Saxon, the darker Norman, the Scot, the Celt, from many climes, of many races—are playing the part in the work of Empire which is every Briton’s birthright to-day. The bond uniting them in the steel line which the German hordes have vainly tried to break is the companionship of the Table Round of the Empire, the bulwark of the world’s civilization against the most formidable menace ever launched by the powers of darkness.