o the
line that you have a right to be at G.H.Q. When you get to know
G.H.Q. it seems like any other business institution. Many are there
who do not want to be there; but they have been found out. They are
specialists, who know how to do one thing particularly well and are
kept doing it. No use of growling that you would like a "fighting job."

G.H.Q. is the main station on the road of war, which hears the sound
of the guns faintly. Beyond is the region of all the activities that it
commands, up to the trenches, where all roads end and all efforts
consummate. One has seen dreary flat lands of mud and leafless
trees become fair with the spring, the growing harvest reaped, and
the leaves begin to fall. Always the factory of war was in the same
place; the soldiers billeted in the same towns; the puffs of shrapnel
smoke over the same belt of landscape; the ruins of the same
villages being pounded by high explosives. Always the sound of
guns; always the wastage of life, as passing ambulances, the curtains
drawn, speed by, their part swiftly and covertly done. The enormity of
the thing holds the imagination; its sure and orderly processes of an
organized civilization working at destruction win the admiration. There
is a thrill in the courage and sacrifice and the drilled readiness of
response to orders.

The spectator is under varying spells. To-day he seems in a fantastic
world, whose horror makes it impossible of realization. To-morrow, as
his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where
peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace
and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant
roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive
man's world, where nothing counts but organized material force, and
all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the
permanent population.

One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like
the energy of the sun. The war is going on for ever. The reaper cuts
the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews
itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of
men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes
eternal. Nothing can stop it.

XIV
Trenches In Winter

The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is
that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the
mud and winds of