the middle distance with Death riding at their head. The only glory that
I have discovered in this war is in men's hearts--it's not external.
Were one to paint the spirit of this war he would depict a mud
landscape, blasted trees, an iron sky; wading through the slush and
shell-holes would come a file of bowed figures, more like outcasts from
the 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 "To Glory" about what we're doing out here;
there's no flash of swords or splendour of uniforms. There are only very
tired men determined to carry on. The war will be won by tired men who
could never again pass an insurance test, a mob of broken
counter-jumpers, ragged ex-plumbers and quite unheroic persons. We're
civilians in khaki, but because of the ideals for which we fight we've
managed to acquire soldiers' hearts.

My flow of thought was interrupted by a burst of song in which I was
compelled to join. We're all writing letters around one candle; suddenly
the O.C. looked up and began, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. We
sang it in parts. It was in Southport, when I was about nine years old,
that I first heard that sung. You had gone for your first trip to
America, leaving a very lonely family behind you. We children were
scared to death that you'd be drowned. One evening, coming back from a
walk on the sand-hills, we heard voices singing in a garden, God Be With
You Till We Meet Again. The words and the soft dusk, and the vague
figures in the English summer garden, seemed to typify the terror of all
partings. We've said good-bye so often since, and God has been with us.
I don't think any parting was more hard than our last at the prosaic
dock-gates with the cold wind of duty blowing, and the sentry barring
your entrance, and your path leading back to America while mine led on
to France. But you three were regular soldiers--just as much soldiers as