you look back over the parados of the firing trench, across the bleached
and scarred countryside, you remember that _that_, like the scenes of
agony in the clearing station after Loos, is the plain, visible proof
that His Spirit lives in the world of men. But what a Via Dolorosa it
is, that grim ditch dug across Europe, with its crouching men behind the
snipers' plates. Strange path for the twentieth century to have to walk
in, to prove that compassion and righteousness still live.

In all this area the British soldier walks with a singular
_insouciance_. It is not simply that he is brave. He is that, supremely
so, and not least when he is very much afraid and will not show it and
carries on with his job. But there is more in it than that. There is a
kind of warlike genius in him which makes him do the right thing in the
right way, so that he appeals to humour and comradeship as well as to
gallantry. It was one of our sergeant-majors who before a battalion
attack offered £5 to the man of his company who was first in the enemy's
trench. Think of it for a moment. He appealed to their sporting
instinct; he turned their thoughts from death and wounds and introduced
a jest into every dug-out that night; and he indicated, without
boasting, that he was going to be first over the parapet. He made it
certain that every sportsman in the company--and what British regular is
not--would strain every nerve to be first across. And the cream of the
jest was that, stalwart athlete that he was, he was first across
himself! The same may be said of the officer; he wins more than
obedience from his men. I have seen senior N.C.O.'s crying like children
because their young officer was dead.

Along with this courage and comradeship and humour there is often a
great deal of fatalism. It expresses itself in many ways, in the reading
of Omar Khayyam--'The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes'--for