ing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who had been lured
on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German weakness, and looking
ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as this which would lead only
to other salients, after desperate and futile endeavor.

PART FOUR. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled
hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men--ours and the
enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies
of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their
brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to
go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly,
and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17
the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had
cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world
by the immense martyrdom of boys--British, French, and German--on the
western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of
their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the
long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of
gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on
our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had
weakened and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No
mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing
a vision of the war's end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground
we had gained--the new horror of that new salient--had sapped into the
confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of
German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no
good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when
from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under
ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made
by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks,
without much plan or purpose, was only "asking for trouble" from German
counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas,
flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess
of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling
up the lists of death.