the officer who
was bored. "Even high explosives don't go down very deep."

"It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! It seems more than
human. It's like some convulsion of nature."

"There's no adventure in modern war," said the bored man. "It's a dirty
scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive experts."

"Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn.
Hell must be a game compared with that."

The guns went on pounding away, day after day, laboring, pummeling,
hammering, like Thor with his thunderbolts. It was the preparation for
battle. No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being
killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and outside
the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and away up
at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back
intermittently, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came
out into the open. The battle began at dawn on September 25th.

VI

In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his troops away from
the main battle-front, "subsidiary attacks" were made upon the German
lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres, and
southward to La Bassee Canal at Givenchy, by the troops of the Second
and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John French, in his despatch,
"was most effectively achieved." It was achieved by the bloody sacrifice
of many brave battalions in the 3d and 14th Divisions (Yorkshire, Royal
Scots, King's Royal Rifles, and others), and by the Meerut Division
of the Indian Corps, who set out to attack terrible lines without
sufficient artillery support, and without reserves behind them, and
without any chance of holding the ground they might capture. It was part
of the system of war. They were the pawns of "strategy," serving a high
purpose in a way that seemed to them without reason. Not for them was
the glory of a victorious assault. Their job was to "demonstrate" by
exposing their bodies to devouring fire, and by attacking earthworks
which they were not expected to hold. Here and there men of ours, after
their rush over No Man's Land under a deadly sweep of machine-gun fire,
flung themselves into the enemy's trenches, bayoneting the Germans and
capturing the greater part of their first line. There they lay panting
among wounded and dead, and after that shoveled up earth and burrowed to
get cover from the shelling which was soon t