ripping the top layer of sandbags--the
boyish gay P. would with his subalterns pore over the maps, receive
with sinking heart the ominous "secret and confidential" and "very
secret" messages brought in by those fine youths the runners; fill in, not
without murmurings, those _pro forma's_ which at one time seemed likely to
turn fighting into clerkship, or "censor" those long pages of homely
scrawl in copying pencil which were to keep up yet a day more the spirits
of sweethearts, mothers and wives.

Thus the particular memories of trenches and our times and seasons in
them, roused by such a light matter as this which has aroused them now,
pass with the greatest emotion before the mind. It is not fashionable
to talk of the war. Is the counsel, then, to follow the Psalmist:

I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my
tongue....

I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea, even
from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

One has not to follow him very long in that.

My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the
fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue.

One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us,
would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of
experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it
be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on
the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its
sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the shell-like house
beside built in?--seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage
of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle--why should every yard of its flimsy
fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through
its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings,
its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but
the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the
very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet
it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it
was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts
lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no
question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree
glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that
these scenes awakened. Their memory is