s decked out with holly
and mistletoe. Forty or fifty men were lying there in their beds, some
bandaged about the head, a few about the face, more about the body,
arms, and legs. None of them seemed to be in serious pain, and nearly
all were cheerful, even bright, boyish, and almost childlike. What
stories they had to tell of the inferno they had come from! It was hell,
infernal hell. They would go back, of course, when they were better, and
had to do so, but if anybody said he _wanted_ to go back he was telling
a damn'd lie.

One boy, scarcely out of his teens, with soft, womanly eyes, light hair,
and a face that made me sure he must be the living image of his mother,
had had a narrow escape. After being wounded he had been taken prisoner
to a farmhouse. Nobody there had done anything for him, and at length,
after many hours, watching his opportunity, he had crept into the
darkness and got back to the British trenches by crawling for nearly a
quarter of a mile on hands and knees.

Another young soldier, an Irishman, told me a brave story, such as might
have been allowed, I thought, to scratch and scrape its way through the
thorn hedge of the strictest censorship. It was a story of the great
days before the armies had dug themselves into the earth like rabbits.
Perhaps I had heard something about it? I had. Eight hundred of his
cavalry regiment had ridden full gallop into a solid block of the enemy,
making a way through them as wide as Sackville Street. At length the
Germans in front had dropped their rifles and held up their hands,
whereupon our men had ceased to slay. But, being unable to rein in their
frantic horses, they had been compelled to gallop on. Then, while their
backs were turned, the treacherous Huns had picked up their rifles and
fired on them from behind, killing many of our best men.

"And what did you do then?" I asked.

"Turned back and----"

"And what?"

"Took one man alive, sor."

"And the rest?"

"Left them there, sor."

"And how many of you got back?"

"Less than two hundred, sor."

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES

Then Christmas in the trenches--we had glimpses of that, too. The people
who governed nations from their Parliament Houses might have doubts
about the peace-dream of the poets, the Utopia of universal brotherhood
which gleams somewhere ahead in the far future of humanity, but the
soldiers on the battlefields, even in the welter of blood and death had
somehow heard the c