with about ten of my men, but had to leave the others to follow with a
sergeant.

At last we sighted our objective, a cluster of chalk mounds surrounded
with broken wire, shell craters, corpses, wreathed in smoke, dotted
with men. I think we all ran across the ground between our front
line and our objective, though it must have been more or less dead
ground. Anyhow, only one man was hit. When we got close the scene
was absurdly like a conventional battle picture--the sort of picture
that one never believes in for a minute. There was a wild mixture of
regiments--Jocks, Irishmen, Territorials, etc., etc. There was no
proper trench left. There were rifles, a machine gun, a Lewis rifle,
and bombs all going at the same time. There were wounded men sitting
in a kind of helpless stupor; there were wounded trying to drag
themselves back to our own lines; there were the dead of whom no one
took any notice. But the prevailing note was one of utter weariness
coupled with dogged tenacity.

Here and there were men who were self-conscious, wondering what would
become of themselves. I was one of them, and we were none the better
for it. Most of the fellows, though, had forgotten themselves. They no
longer flinched, or feared. They had got beyond that. They were just
set on clinging to that mound and keeping the Huns at bay until their
officer gave the word to retire. Their spirit was the spirit of the
oarsman, the runner, or the footballer, who has strained himself to
the utmost, who if he stopped to wonder whether he could go on or not
would collapse; but who, because he does not stop to wonder, goes on
miraculously long after he should, by all the laws of nature, have
succumbed to sheer exhaustion.