ing great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying daily for
me. That is the sort of community we now are--a community in which one man
dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and
quarrels, we _are_ brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with
blood. It is for us these men are dying--for the women, the old men, and
the rejected men--and to preserve civilisation and the common life which
we are keeping alive, or building."

So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file,
the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same
spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal
world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching
quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in
that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so
many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or
shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a
military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce
familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to
whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonderful
their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. "I do not
find it easy," writes a chaplain at the front who knows his men and has
shared all the dangers of their life--"to give incidents and sayings. I
could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How
many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others
before themselves! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who,
after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his intrenching tool, a little
trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept
backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of
another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under snipers'
fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and
rescue came. Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are
never known. Indeed it is the heroism of _all_ the men _all_ the time
which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen
months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine
of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never show
the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what the