g around his bullet head, hard and tough and cunning in
war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical face and freckles, and love
of pretty girls and all children, until he was killed in Flanders; and
the Permanent Temporary Lieutenant who fell on the Somme; and the
Giant who had a splinter through his brain beyond Arras; and many other
Highland gentlemen, and one English padre who went with them always to
the trenches, until a shell took his head off at the crossroads.

It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They were determined
to go fast and go far. Their pride of race was stronger than the strain
on their nerves. Many of them, I am certain, had no sense of fear, no
apprehension of death or wounds. Excitement, the comradeship of courage,
the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above anxiety before the battle
began, though here and there men like Ginger, of more delicate fiber, of
imagination as well as courage, must have stared in great moments at the
grisly specter toward whom they would soon be walking.

In other villages were battalions of the 47th London Division. They,
too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the Scots.
They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a
different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel--nerved, with
more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt
against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been "doped"
for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches
addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out.
They were to fight for the glory of the old town... the old town where
they had lived in little suburban houses with flower-gardens, where they
had gone up by the early morning trains to city offices and government
offices and warehouses and shops, in days before they ever guessed they
would go a-soldiering, and crouch in shell-holes under high explosives,
and thrust sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their best.
They would go through with it. They would keep their sense of humor and
make cockney jokes at death. They would show the stuff of London pride.

"Domine, dirige nos!"

I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in tea-shops with them
when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were the
most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball
in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter