we
make only an incident of the officer who went out to silence a machine
gun and was found lying dead across the gun with the gunner dead beside
him.

Those whose business it was to observe, the six correspondents,
Robinson, Thomas, Gibbs, Philips, Russell and myself, went and came
always with a sense of incapacity and sometimes with a feeling that
writing was a worthless business when others were fighting. The line of
advance on the big map at our quarters extended as the brief army
reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures
and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every
copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day. At
corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and officers
would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and village,
every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station and
prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge and
within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make shelter
from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and lunch and
chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or perhaps to
hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in Ypres sector,
which had become relatively quiet.

They had their letters and packages from home before they slept and had
written letters in return after waking; and there was nothing to do now
except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality that had been
expended in the fierce work where shells were still threshing the earth,
which rose in clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring passive
resistance.

There was much talk early in the war about British cheerfulness; so much
that officers and men began to resent it as expressing the idea that
they took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when it was the last
thing outside of Hades that any sane man would choose. It was a question
in my own mind at times if Hades would not have been a pleasant change.
Yet the characterization is true, peculiarly true, even in the midst of
the fighting on the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes the place of emotionalism
as the armor against hardship and death; a good-humored balance between
exhilaration and depression which meets smile with smile and creates an
atmosphere superior to all vicissitudes. Why should we be downhearted?
Why, indeed, when it does no good. Not "Merrie England!" War is not a
me