hen we came
to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult
of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I
hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years
that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had
greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as
an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the
grisly game.

PART TWO. THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE

EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY

I

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front
in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army
had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory
of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve
Chapelle. The "Old Contemptibles" were an army of ghosts whose dead
clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still
"carried on" as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into
those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors were Regular
officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the staffs of new
divisions and to train the army of volunteers now being raised at home,
and men who were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines:
those, and non-commissioned officers who were the best schoolmasters of
the new boys, the best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn
in their courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed
according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the
shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the
trenches said to me: "I am one out of 150 Regular officers still serving
with their battalions. That is to say, there are 150 of us left in the
fighting-lines out of 1,500."

That little Regular Army of ours had justified its pride in a long
history of fighting courage. It had helped to save England and France by
its own death. Those boys of ours whom I had seen in the first August
of the war, landing at Boulogne and marching, as though to a festival,
toward the enemy, with French girls kissing them and loading them with
fruit and flowers, had proved the quality of their spirit and training.
As riflemen they had stupefied the enemy, brought to a sudden check by
forces they had despised. They held their fire until the German ranks
were within eight hundred yards of them, and then mowed them down as
though b