h you would say had never been
accustomed to indefiniteness about anything--must have impressed the men
under his command with the confidence that he knew his business and that
they must follow him. Yet it could twinkle on occasion with a pungent
humor as he told his story, which did not take him long but left you
long a-thinking. A writer who was as good a writer as he was a soldier
if he had had the same experience could have made a book out of it; but
then he could not have been a man of action at the same time.

He made it clear at once that he had not led his brigade in person over
the parapet, or helped in person to bomb the enemy's dugouts, or
indulged in any other kind of gallery play. I do not think that all the
drawing-rooms in London or all the reception committees which receive
gallant sons in their home towns could betray him into the faintest
simulation of the pose of a hero. He was not a hero and he did not
believe in heroics. His occupation was commanding men and taking
trenches.

Not once did he utter anything approaching a boast over a feat which his
friends and superiors had expected of him. This would be "swank," as
they call it, only he would characterize it by even a stronger word. He
is the kind of officer, the working, clear-thinking type, who would earn
promotion by success at arms in a long war, while the gallery-play crowd
whose promotion and favors come by political gift and academic reports
in time of peace would be swept into the dustbin. He was simply a
capable fighter; and war is fighting.

His men had gone over the "lid" in excellent fashion, quite on time. He
had seen at once what they were in for, but he had no doubt that they
would keep on, for he had warned them to expect machine gun fire and
told them what to do in case it came. They applied the system in which
he had trained them with a coolness that won his approbation as a
directing expert--his matter-of-fact approbation in the searching
analysis of every detail, with no ecstasies about their unparalleled
gallantry. He expected them to be gallant. However, I could imagine that
if you said a word against them his eyes would flash indignation. They
were his men and he might criticize them, but no one else might except a
superior officer. The first wave reached the first-line German trench on
time, that is, half of them did; the rest, including more than half of
the officers, were down, dead or wounded, in No Man's Land in the swi