stout-heartedness" which is "the acme of what Aristotle meant by
virtue." For himself, he discovers that the plague of his former modes
of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of the age. The doubt
of many things which it were wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt of
one's own capacity for heroism. All those doubts and self-despisings had
vanished in the supreme surrender to sacrificial duty. The doors of the
Kingdom of Heroism were flung so wide that the meanest might enter in,
and in that act the humblest became comrades of Drake's men, who could
jest as they died. No one knows his real strength till it is put to the
test; the highest joy of life is to discover that the soul can meet the
test, and survive it.

The Somme battlefield, from which all these letters were despatched, is
an Inferno much more terrible than any Dante pictured. It is a vast sea
of mud, full of the unburied dead, pitted and pock-marked by
shell-holes, treeless and horseless, "the abomination of desolation."
And the men who toil across it look more like outcasts of the London
Embankment than soldiers. "They're loaded down like pack-animals, their
shoulders are rounded, they're wearied to death, but they go on and go
on.... There's no flash of sword or splendour of uniforms. They're only
very tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men
who can never again pass an insurance test." Yet they carry on--the
"broken counter-jumper, the ragged ex-plumber," the clerk from the
office, the man from the farm; Londoner, Canadian, Australian, New
Zealander, men drawn from every quarter of the Empire, who daily justify
their manhood by devotion to an ideal and by contempt of death. And in
the heart of each there is a settled conviction that the cause for which
they have sacrificed so much must triumph. They have no illusions about
an early peace. They see their comrades fall, and say quietly, "He's
gone West." They do heroic things daily, which in a lesser war would