here was the task that had to be done.

Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob; with
a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet, a queer
little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year or so before the
war, you would most certainly have pronounced Chinese. He belonged to a
Northumbrian battalion; it does not matter exactly which. As we returned
from this front line, trudging along the winding path through the barbed
wire tangles before the smashed and captured German trench that had been
taken a fortnight before, I fell behind my guardian captain and had
a brief conversation wit this individual. He was a lad in the early
twenties, weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes. He was, he told me, a
miner. I asked my stock question in such cases, whether he would go back
to the old work after the war. He said he would, and then added--with
the events of overnight on his mind: "If A'hm looky."

Followed a little silence. Then I tried my second stock remark for such
cases. One does not talk to soldiers at the front in this war of Glory
or the "Empire on which the sun never sets" or "the meteor flag of
England" or of King and Country or any of those fine old headline
things. On the desolate path that winds about amidst the shell craters
and the fragments and the red-rusted wire, with the silken shiver of
passing shells in the air and the blue of the lower sky continually
breaking out into eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such
panoplies of the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon
a greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of thing
now. We are very near the waking point.

"Well," I said, "it's got to be done."