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
example, in the indifference so often shown by men if they lose through
their own fault some 'cushy job' and have to go back to the line, or in
the doing of really foolish things, foolish because dangerous, but
useless. I remember sitting outside the dug-out of Captain Chree (who
afterwards laid down his life on the Somme) at battalion headquarters,
and watching the shelling of one of our batteries of 18-pounders some
five hundred yards back. The Germans had searched for it repeatedly with
lavish expenditure of ammunition, and that afternoon they got it
repeatedly, with very unpleasant results. But of course there were many
misses. Whenever the German shells fell short they burst in the field,
in front of the battery, which was bounded on two sides by a road. In
the midst of the bombardment a soldier came down the road facing us and,
instead of walking round by the cross-roads, cut across the field in
which shells were bursting. He deliberately left comparative safety for
real danger simply in order to save himself five minutes' walk. On
another occasion, when I was at dusk one evening in Vierstraat, a Tommy
came along carrying some burden. At this point he got tired and planted
it down right in the middle of the cross-roads. Another man told him he
could not have chosen a worse place for a rest, that the Boche was
always firing rifles and machine-guns up the road, but he was prevailed
upon to move only with the greatest difficulty. Perhaps in another class
was the soldier the doctor and I came upon suddenly in a ruined house in
Ypres kicking with all the strength of an iron-shod boot at the fuse of
an unexploded German shell. A friend with his hands in his pockets was
watching the proceedings with much interest. He said he was only
wanting the fuse as a souvenir, but he would soon have got that to keep
and a good deal more. The doctor was quite peevish about it, as the
saying is!

When an attack is being made or repelled, t