the War Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home
Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Information, where
officials on enormous salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and
decided how to spend vast sums of public money on "organization" which
made no difference to the man stifling his cough below the parapet in a
wet fog of Flanders, staring across No Man's Land for the beginning of a
German attack.

In all classes of people there was an epidemic of dancing, jazzing,
card-playing, theater-going. They were keeping their spirits up
wonderfully. Too well for men slouching about the streets of London on
leave, and wondering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the things
they had seen and forward to the things they would have to do. People at
home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the trenches;
anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to excited tales
of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The windows had been
broken. Many people had been killed in a house somewhere in Hackney. It
was frightful. The Germans were devils. They ought to be torn to pieces,
every one of them. The soldier on leave saw crowds of people taking
shelter in underground railways, working--men among them, sturdy lads,
panic-stricken. But for his own wife and children he had an evil sense
of satisfaction in these sights. It would do them good. They would know
what war meant--just a little. They would not be so easy in their damned
optimism. An air raid? Lord God, did they know what a German barrage was
like? Did they guess how men walked day after day through harassing fire
to the trenches? Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where
men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells,
five-point--nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets,
snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets
in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden
hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb could
fall without killing a group of men.

"Oh, but you have your dugouts!" said a careless little lady.

The soldier smiled.

It was no use talking. The people did not want to hear the tragic side
of things. Bairnsfather's "Ole Bill" seemed to them to typify the spirit
of the fighting-man... "'Alf a mo', Kaiser!"...

The British soldier was gay and careless of death--always. Shell-fire