rtillery fire. How any men
could go the breadth of No Man's Land and survive would have been called
miraculous in other days; in these days we know that it was due to the
law of chance which will wound one man a dozen times and never bark the
skin of another.

Any troops might have been warranted in giving up the task before they
reached the first German trench. Veterans could have retired without
criticism. This is the privilege of tried soldiers who have won
victories and are secured by such an expression as, "If the Old Guard
saw that it could not be done, why, then, it could not." But these were
New Army men in their first offensive. Their victories were yet to be
won. This was "the day."

Each officer and each man had given himself up as a hostage to death for
his cause, his pride of battalion and his manhood when he went over the
parapet. The business of the officers was to lead their men to certain
goals; that of the men was to go with the officers. All very simple
reasoning, this, yet hardly reason: the second nature of training and
spirit. How officers had studied the details of their objectives on the
map in order to recognize them when they were reached! How like drill it
was the way that those human waves moved forward! But they were not
waves for long in some instances, only survivors still advancing as if
they were parts of a wave, unseen by their commanders in the
shell-smoke, buffeted by bursts of high explosives, with every man
simply keeping on toward the goal till he arrived or fell. Foolhardy,
you say. Perhaps. It is an easy word to utter over a map after the
event. You would think of finer words if you had been at the front.

Would England have wanted her New Army to act otherwise?--the first
great army that she had put into the field on trial on the continent of
Europe against an army which had, by virtue of its own experience, the
right to consider the newcomers as amateurs? They became more skilful
later; but in war all skill is based on such courage as these men showed
that day. Those who sit in offices in times of peace and think otherwise
had better be relieved. It is the precept that the German Army itself
taught and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July 1st a question was
answered for anyone who had been in the Manchurian war. He learned that
those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem
can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious
fanati