blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up
for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not
yet received theirs, he had none himself.

"It's not fair to the men," he said. "I don't want anything they don't
have."

No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He
spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the
comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage
of his soldiers who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against
German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of
war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and
dangers shared.

What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me;
one of the most memorable of my life.

"I was glad you could come," he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if
he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.

Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a
lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving
the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred
yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen
us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets
came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some
trees.

In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant's cottage that was
battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by
bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just
getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real
trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some
surprise, that I had not washed my face.

"The food was just as good, wasn't it?" remarked the major. "We get
quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been
up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre
supper."

With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like
by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one
bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off
and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison.
All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle.
An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a
good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the
houses as under the pestle-head in a mortar; blown walls into dust;
taken bricks from the eas