enches to attack in a murky dawn!... We said good night to General
Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama
of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass
house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many
hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my soul when I
stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness,
over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to break one's neck,
with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far away, watery lights
in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of
artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting early
to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. There would be more
streams of bloody, muddy men, more crowds of miserable prisoners, more
dead bodies lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plunging
into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke and mud, more dead
horses, disemboweled, and another victory at fearful cost, over one of
the Flanders ridges.

Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go
on--this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left
in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this?
When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take,
and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we
could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be extermination
on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General Harington had
said: "The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of reserves on hand
and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-morrow."

As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic
drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went
to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my
window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and
said, "O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the
end." Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before
the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the
duckboards... Or Montague--white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a
far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by
his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of
battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me w