cism the courage of the land of Shintoism and Bushido.

In most places the charge reached the German trenches. There, frequently
outnumbered by the garrison, the men stabbed and bombed, fought to put
out machine guns that were turned on them and so stay the tide coming
out of the mouths of dugouts--simply fought and kept on fighting with a
kind of divine stubbornness.

Tennyson's "Light Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July
1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out
and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of
exhilaration with horses bearing the men. The battalions of July 1st
went on their own feet driven by their own will toward their goals,
without turning back. Surviving officers with objectives burned in their
brains led the surviving men past the first-line trenches if the
directions required this. "Theirs not to reason why--theirs but to do
and die--cannon to right of them volleyed and thundered,"--old-fashioned,
smoke-powder cannon firing round shot for the Light Brigade; for these
later-day battalions every kind of modern shell and machine guns, showers
of death and sheets of death!

The goal--the goal! Ten men out of a hundred reached it in a few cases
and when they arrived they sent up rocket signals to say that they were
there! there! there! Two or three battalions literally disappeared into
the blue. I thought that the Germans might have taken a considerable
number of prisoners, but not so. Those isolated lots who went on to
their objectives regardless of every other thought died fighting, as
final proof of the New Army's spirit, against the Germans enraged by
their heavy losses from the preliminary British bombardment.

It was where gaps existed and gallantry went blindly forward, unable in
the fog of shell-smoke to see whether the units on the right or the left
were up, that these sacrifices of heroism were made; but where command
was held over the line and the opposition was not of a variable kind
counsel was taken of the impossible and retreat was ordered. That is,
the units turned back toward their own trenches under direction. They
had to pass through the same curtain of shell fire in returning as in
charging, and ahead of them through the blasts they drove their
prisoners.

"Never mind. It's from your own side!" said one Briton to a German who
had been knocked over by a German "krump" when he picked himself up; and
the German answere