assed artillery
which put each man to the supreme test of courage, demanding the
last strength of his soul? Some of them had been slackers, rebels
against discipline, "hard cases." Some of them were sensitive fellows
with imaginations over-developed by cinematograph shows and the
unhealthiness of life in cities. Some of them were no braver than you
or I, my readers. And yet out of all this mass of manhood, with all their
faults, vices, coward instincts, pride of courage, unexpressed ideals,
unconscious patriotism, old traditions of pluck, untutored faith in
things more precious than self-interest--the mixture that one finds in
any great body of men--there was made an army, that "contemptible
little army" of ours which has added a deathless story of human
valour to the chronicles of our race.

These men who came out with the first Expeditionary Force had to
endure a mode of warfare more terrible than anything the world has
known before, and for week after week, month after month, they were
called upon to stand firm under storms of shells which seemed to
come from no human agency, but to be devilish in intensity and
frightfulness of destruction. Whole companies of them were
annihilated, whole battalions decimated, yet the survivors were led to
the shambles again. Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and
filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name
and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the
new-comers. Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in
humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance,
these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men
from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little
England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though
sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell.
With a pride of manhood beyond one's imagination, with a stern and
bitter contempt for all this devilish torture, loathing it but "sticking"
it, very much afraid yet refusing to surrender to the coward in their
souls (the coward in our souls which tempts all of us), sick of the
blood and the beastliness, yet keeping sane (for the most part) with
the health of normal minds and bodies in spite of all this wear and
tear upon the nerves, the rank-and-file of that British Expedition in
France and Flanders, under the leadership of young men who gave
their lives, with the largess of great p