staff officer that night, "there has been good
work to-day. We have taken several lines of trenches, and the
operation is proceeding very well."

We bent over his map, following the line drawn by his finger, listening
to details of a grim bit of work, glad that five hundred German
prisoners had been taken that day. As he spoke the window rattled,
and we heard the boom of another gun... The war was going on,
though it had seemed so quiet at the front.

9

For several months there was comparative quietude at the British
front after the tremendous attacks upon our lines at Soissons and
Venizel and Vic-sur-Aisne, and the still more bloody battles round
Ypres in the autumn of the first year of war. Each side settled down
for the winter campaign, and killing was done by continual artillery fire
with only occasional bayonet charges between trench and trench.
That long period of dark wet days was the most tragic ordeal of our
men, and a time when depression settled heavily upon their spirits, so
that not all their courage could keep any flame of enthusiasm in their
hearts for such fine words as honour and glory.

In "Plug Street" and other lines of trenches they stood in water with
walls of oozy mud about them, until their legs rotted and became
black with a false frostbite, until many of them were carried away with
bronchitis and pneumonia, and until all of them, however many
comforters they tied about their necks, or however many body-belts
they used, were shivering, sodden scarecrows, plastered with slime.
They crawled with lice, these decent Englishmen from good clean
homes, these dandy men who once upon a time had strolled down
the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, immaculate, and fragrant as their
lavender kid gloves. They were eaten alive by these vermin and
suffered the intolerable agony of itch. Strange and terrible diseases
attacked some of them, though the poisonous microbes were
checked by vigilant men in laboratories behind the front before they
could spread an epidemic. For the first time men without science
heard the name of cerebro-spinal meningitis and shuddered at it. The
war became a hopeless, dreary thing, without a thrill to it, except
when men wading in water were smashed by shell-fire and floated
about in a bloody mess which ran red through all a trench. That was a
thrill of beastliness, but gave no fire to men's hearts. Passion, if it had
ever burnt in these British soldiers' hearts, had smouldere