d do that, so I had changed the
specification."

Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is among the junior commands,
down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on
their own, through unbelievable adventures. They are
inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the
single ideal--to kill--which they follow with men as
single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist;
when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the
"victories" of the old bookish days. But there is always the
killing--the well-schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing
out and the mowing down of its occupants; the unsuspicious
battalion far in the rear, located after two nights' extreme
risk alone among rubbish of masonry, and wiped out as it eats or
washes itself; and, more rarely, the body to body encounter with
animals removed from the protection of their machinery, when the
bayonets get their chance. The Boche does not at all like
meeting men whose womenfolk he has dishonoured or mutilated, or
used as a protection against bullets. It is not that these men
are angry or violent. They do not waste time in that way. They
kill him.

THE BUSINESS OF WAR

The French are less reticent than we about atrocities
committed by the Boche, because those atrocities form part of
their lives. They are not tucked away in reports of
Commissions, and vaguely referred to as "too awful." Later
on, perhaps, we shall be unreserved in our turn. But they do
not talk of them with any babbling heat or bleat or make funny
little appeals to a "public opinion" that, like the Boche, has
gone underground. It occurs to me that this must be because
every Frenchman has his place and his chance, direct or
indirect, to diminish the number of Boches still alive.
Whether he lies out in a sandwich of damp earth, or sweats the
big guns up the crests behind the trees, or brings the fat,
loaded barges into the very heart of the city, where the
shell-wagons wait, or spends his last crippled years at the
harvest, he is doing his work to that end.

If he is a civilian he may--as he does--say things about his
Government, which, after all, is very like other popular
governments. (A lifetime spent in watching how the cat jumps
does not make lion-tamers.) But there is very little human
rubbish knocking about France to hinder work or darken
counsel. Above all, there is a thing called the Honour of
Civilization, to which France is a