s, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on
their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and
west--they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies
despite the iron discipline.

It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every
hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who
would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and
armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them
into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied
supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet
its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the
dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.

It became apparent through those two months of piecemeal advance that
the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty
"funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if they
were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters--well, human
psychology does not change. They were the type that made the
professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of
every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation
approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.

Such became members of the machine gun corps, which took an oath never
to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in
shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them,
or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of
fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn
on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes
their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably
by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts,
than by command.

Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its
thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch
devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true
an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's
rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and
Longueval and the Switch Trench--these are symbolic names of that
attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No
for answer.

You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those