d sleep, and live together in close quarters,
sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless
waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over
trifles.

[Illustration: BELGIAN SOLDIERS TELEPHONING TO AN ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN THE
APPROACH OF A GERMAN TAUBE.

These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a
portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.]

What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It
heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly
and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings
out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three
thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them
I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of
cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and
they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent," and I see the
wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned
babies. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other
men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in
the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of
appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone
with helpless victims.

You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without
feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with
life-long friends. The high officer and the cockney Tommy have that
linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with
him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection.
Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to
verify what you say. You have passed through an unbelievable thing
together, and you have a witness.

Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It
isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companionship meant for him new
shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It
meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liege, hearing about
his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the
horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace
days. The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than
the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood,
the woman go