Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers,
which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No
one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The
men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even
spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all
as a part of the day's work, with that singular, redoubtable
combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.

Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and
making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for
his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army
Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it.
How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade?
Never! He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the
boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed
before he went to recite.

Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time
enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will
be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses
who look after you will.

I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same
boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you
pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter
smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has
to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the
trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners
are a cult.

There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious
youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in
the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a
selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the
trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death
and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.

But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology
of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind
of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the
prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.
They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not
have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men
who have been in the trenches will r