that of utter exhaustion seemed dead, somewhere deep down in their
hearts the will to endure urged them on.

Is there no painter, no poet, who can enshrine for future generations
the memory of this historic scene? We have here a sudden glimpse of
Britain at her best. Hot sun, torment of burning feet on the cruel,
white, and endless roads, the odour and sight and sound of death and
wounds, pressure of pressing men, and love of life and the horrid
loneliness of fear--all that was Giant Circumstance; but he could not
extinguish the souls of men made in the image of God for suffering and
endurance and triumph. English and Irish and Scottish--but brothers in
hatred of retreat and in their determination to push on until they could
turn and strike--the glamour of great names hung round all those
tattered battalions; and the very essence of it was in the oldest of
them all, in history and in campaigns, this famous Lowland regiment. Of
that at such a time they thought little, if at all; sheer physical facts
pressed too hard, yet in their desperate victory over circumstance they
wrote the most golden page of their story, and enriched the blood of all
who follow them.

You can find a certain humour in war if you look for it, though war is
not amusing, and life at home has many more entertaining incidents in it
than life at the front. One officer of The Royals fell sound asleep in a
trench during the climax of a terrific bombardment, and awoke to find
himself alone among the dead. (He makes us laugh when he tells the
story, but at the time it cannot have been just very humorous.) He
pushed on after the retreating army, and though--owing to the mistake of
an officer at a cross-roads who stood saying, 'Third division to the
right, So-and-so division to the left,' when it should have been the
other way about--he lost his way, he found the battalion a fortnight