rodigals, to the monstrous
appetite of Death, fought with something like superhuman qualities.

6

Although I spent most of my time on the Belgian and French side of
the war, I had many glimpses of the British troops who were enduring
these things, and many conversations with officers and men who had
come, but a few hours ago, from the line of fire. I went through British
hospitals and British ambulance trains where thousands of them lay
with new wounds, and I dined with them when after a few weeks of
convalescence they returned to the front to undergo the same ordeal.
Always I felt myself touched with a kind of wonderment at these men.
After many months of war the unwounded men were still unchanged,
to all outward appearance, though something had altered in their
souls. They were still quiet, self-controlled, unemotional. Only by a
slight nervousness of their hands, a slightly fidgety way so that they
could not sit still for very long, and by sudden lapses into silence, did
some of them show the signs of the strain upon them. Even the lightly
wounded men were astoundingly cheerful, resolute, and unbroken.
There were times when I used to think that my imagination
exaggerated the things I had seen and heard, and that after all war
was not so terrible, but a rather hard game with heavy risks. It was
only when I walked among the wounded who had been more than
"touched," and who were the shattered wrecks of men, that I realized
again the immensity of the horror through which these other men had
passed and to which some of them were going back. When the
shrieks of poor tortured boys rang in my ears, when one day I passed
an officer sitting up in his cot and laughing with insane mirth at his
own image in a mirror, and when I saw men with both legs amputated
up to the thighs, or with one leg torn to ribbons, and another already
sawn away, lying among blinded and paralysed men, and men
smashed out of human recognition but still alive, that I knew the
courage of those others, who having seen and known, went back to
risk the same frightfulness.

7

There was always a drama worth watching at the British base, for it
was the gate of those who came in and of those who went out, "the
halfway house" as a friend of mine called another place in France,
between the front and home.

Everything came here first--the food for guns and men, new boots for
soldiers who had marched the leather off their feet; the comforters
and b