too tired to pray for rest; too tired to think!

The average man is, I am sure, quite ignorant of the effect which
extreme exhaustion has on the brain. As the weary hours drag by, it
seems as if a deadness, a sort of paralysis, creeps up the limbs,
upwards towards the head. The bones of the feet ache with a very
positive pain. It needs a concentration of mind that a stupefied brain
can ill afford to give to force the knees to keep from doubling under
the weight of the body. The hands feel as if they were swelling until
the boiling blood would ooze from the finger-tips. The lungs seem too
exhausted to expand; the neck too weary to support the heavy head. The
shoulders ache under the galling weight of sword and haversack, and
every inch of clammy skin on the body seems ten times as sensitive as it
normally is. The nerves in the face and hands feel like swelled veins
that itch so that they long to be torn by the nails. The tongue and eyes
seem to expand to twice their usual size. Sound itself loses its sharp
conciseness, and reaches the brain only as a blurred and indistinct
impression.

But perhaps the reader may say that he has once done twenty-five or
thirty miles in a day, and did not feel half as bad as that. He must
remember, however, that these men had been doing over twenty-five miles
every day for the last ten days, and that, in addition to the physical
fatigue, they had suffered the mental fatigue caused by fighting. Their
few hours of halting were generally occupied by trench digging. They
were not having a fifth of the sleep that such a life requires. They
were protected neither from the heat of noon nor from the chill of dawn.
The food they got was not fresh food, and their equipment weighed ninety
pounds! Lesser men would have died; men imbued with a feebler
determination would have fainted. As it was, the transport was crowded
with men whose feet had failed them, and many must have fallen behind,
to be killed or made prisoner. The majority "stuck it" manfully, and
faced every fresh effort with a cool, gruff determination that was
wonderful. This spirit saved the Allies from the first frenzied blow of
Germany, in just the same way that it had saved England from the Armada
and from Napoleon.

The Subaltern realised the value of his men; indeed, he felt a wholesome
trust and faith in them that individual outbursts of bad temper or lack
of discipline could not shake. They occupied, more than they had ever
do