oyal festivals
and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders,
where a number of "K.'s men" lay on the straw a night or two away from
the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I
heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted
by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been
king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where
his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen
outside that barn and hear those words:

Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his
tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag
that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a mother
and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls
were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London,
where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the
click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside
the camp.

"Who goes there?"

It was a cockney voice.

"Friends."

"Pass, friends. All's well."

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of
a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and
destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New
Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young
soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and killed
in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of
modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an
epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to
the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it
was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said,
like a voice of Fate, "All's well."

V

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches
in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in
every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master
all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large
numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll
in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few
rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they