as none the
less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and
defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the
movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in
past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in
the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in
French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think
over the action.

The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of
1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of
trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of
course.

Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine
to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his
neighbours.

You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you
have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car
speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the
occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we
alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in
an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was
killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving
officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room
now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no
outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant
to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English
youth.

In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard
the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where
they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two
battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of
merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the
teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept
forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.

The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for
them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across
the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The
British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to
reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in
warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to
swim in a cataract of l