t achieved the conquest they hoped. They had been driven back,
had been desperately cut up. They had emerged from their great battle
a mere skeleton of their division.

But I never saw men who looked less like beaten men. Those Belfast
citizens, who sign Covenants and form volunteer armies at home, have
in them the fixed belief that no one in the world is equal to them or
can subdue them. It seems an absurd and arrogant faith. But there is
this to be said. They remained just as convinced of their own
strength after their appalling experience north of the Somme as they
were when they shouted for Sir Edward Carson in the streets of
Belfast. Men who believe in their invincibility the day after they
have been driven back, with their wounds fresh and their bones aching
with weariness, are men whom it will be very difficult to conquer.

Nothing was more interesting than to note the different moods of
these wounded men. One morning, crossing the camp at about 7 o'clock,
I met a Canadian, a tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had just
arrived from the front. The left sleeve of his tunic was cut away.
The bandage round his forearm was soiled and stained. His face was
unshaven and very dirty. His trousers were extraordinarily tattered
and caked with yellow mud. He had somehow managed to lose one boot
and walked unevenly in consequence. I had heard the night before
something about the great and victorious fight in which this man had
been. I congratulated him. He looked at me with a slow, humorous
smile. "Well," he drawled, "they certainly did run some."

A Lancashire boy, undersized, anaemic-looking, his clothes hanging
round him in strips, got hold of me one morning outside the
dressing-station and told me in a high-pitched voice a most amazing
story. It was the best battle story I ever heard from the lips of a
soldier, and the boy who told it to me was hysterical. He had been
buried twice, he and his officer and his Lewis gun, in the course of
an advance. He had met the Prussian Guard in the open, he and his
comrades, and the famous crack corps had "certainly run some." That
was not the boy's phrase. When he reached the climax of his tale his
language was a rich mixture of blasphemy and obscenity.

There was a Munster Fusilier, an elderly, grizzled man who had been
sent back with some German prisoners. He had, by his own account,
quite a flock of them when he started. He found himself, owing to
shrapnel and other troubles