r physical movements set by the mold of
discipline, were in gesture, in voice, in manner the same as when they
were on an English road in training. This was a part of the drill, a
part of man's mastery of his emotions. None were under any illusions as
soldiers of other days had been. Few nursed the old idea of being the
lucky man who would escape. They knew the chances they were taking, the
meaning of frontal attacks and of the murderous and wholesale quickness
of machine gun methods.

Will, organized human will, was in their steps and shining out of their
eyes. It occurred to me that they might have escaped this if England had
kept out of the war at the price of something with which Englishmen
refused to part. "The day" was coming, "the day" they had foreseen, "the
day" for which their people waited.

When they were closing in with death, the clans which make up the
British Empire kept faith with their character as do all men. These
battalions sang the songs and whistled the tunes of drill grounds at
home, though in low notes lest the enemy should hear, and lapsed into
silence when they drew near the front and filed through the
communication trenches.

Quiet the English, that great body of the army which sees itself as the
skirt for the Celtic fringe, ploddingly undemonstrative with memories of
the phlegm of their history holding emotions unexpressed; the Scotch in
their kilts, deep-chested, with their trunk-like legs and broad hips,
braw of face under their mushroom helmets, seemed like mediaeval men of
arms ready in spirit as well as looks for fierce hand-to-hand
encounters; the Welsh, more emotional than the English, had songs which
were pleasant to the ear if the words were unrecognizable; and the
ruddy-faced Irish, with their soft voices, had a beam in their eyes of
inward anticipation of the sort of thing to come which no Irishman ever
meets in a hesitating mood. No overseas troops were there except the
Newfoundland battalion; for only sons of the old country were to strike
on July 1st.

Returning from a tour at night I had absorbed what seemed at one moment
the unrealness and at another the stern, unyielding reality of the
scenes. The old French territorial, with wrinkled face and an effort at
a military mustache, who came out of his sentry box at a control post
squinting by the light of a lantern held close to his nose at the bit of
paper which gave the bearer freedom of the army and nodding with his
polit