rry business; but an Englishman may be cheerful for the sake of self
and comrades.

Of course, these battalions, officers and men, would talk about when the
war would be over. Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the
subject by this time. That of the men who make the war, whose lives are
the lives risked, was worth more, perhaps, than that of people living
thousands of miles away; for it is they who are doing the fighting, who
will stop fighting. To them it would be over when it was won. The time
this would require varied with different men--one year, two years; and
again they would turn satirical and argue whether the sixth or the
seventh year would be the worst. And they talked shop about the latest
wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men buried by
shell-bursts; the value of gas and lachrymatory shells; the ratio of
high explosives to shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or "doing
in" machine guns, all in a routine that had become an accepted part of
life like the details of the stock carried and methods of selling in a
department store.

Indelible the memories of these talks, which often brought out
illustrations of racial temperament. One company was more horrified over
having found a German tied to a trench _parados_ to be killed by
British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other
men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies
of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of blood
and flesh--for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal
militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were
fighting.

With steel helmets on and gas masks over our shoulders, we would leave
our car at the dead line and set off to "see something," when now the
fighting was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in the woods, or
lost on the horizon where the front line of either of these two great
armies, with their immense concentration of men and material and roads
gorged with transport and thousands of belching guns, was held by a few
men with machine guns in shell-craters, their positions sometimes
interwoven. Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are
the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying that
projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points where
the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific
gunnery, and always recollect that the German