of duty which does not allow a man with any self-respect to refuse to
shoulder a heavier burden when called upon to do so.

Those apparently irresponsible subalterns whom you see entertaining
their lady friends at the Canton or Ciro's do, when they are at the
front, have very heavy responsibilities. Even in the ordinary routine
of trench life, so many decisions have to be made, with the chance of
a "telling off" whichever way you choose, and the lives of other men
hanging in the balance. Suppose you are detailed for a wiring party,
and you arrive to find a full moon beaming sardonically down at you.
What are you to do? If you go out you may be seen. Half a dozen of
your men may be mown down by a machine gun. You will be blamed and
will blame yourself for not having decided to remain behind the
parapet. If you do not go out you may set a precedent, and night after
night the work will be postponed, till at last it is too late, and
the Hun has got through, and raided the trench. If you hesitate or ask
advice you are lost. You have to make up your mind in an instant, and
to stand by it. If you waver your men will never have confidence in
you again.

Still more in a push; a junior subaltern is quite likely to find
himself at any time in command of a company, while he may for a day
even have to command the relics of a battalion. I have seen boys
almost fresh from a Public School in whose faces there were two
personalities expressed: the one full of the lighthearted, reckless,
irresponsible vitality of boyhood, and the other scarred with
the anxious lines of one to whom a couple of hundred exhausted
and nerve-shattered men have looked, and not looked in vain, for
leadership and strength in their grim extremity. From a boy in such
a position is required something far more difficult than personal