at gashes out of
red-brick walls.

"Funny business!" said one of the boys.

"Regular Drury Lane melodrama," said another.

"Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch," was another
comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in
some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride
is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when
this beastliness is being done.

"Not a single casualty," said one of the officers when the storm of
shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks.
"Anything wrong with our luck?"

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army
in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone.
No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets,
where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.

"I woke up pretty quick," said one of them, "and thought the house had
fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a
heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother
bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for
breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better--as a knocker-up. I
didn't stop to dress."

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of
his escape.

"K.'s men" had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months
of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not
appeal humorously to sensitive men.

"Any room for us there?" asked one of these bronzed fellows as he
marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices
of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.

"Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German
trenches," was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned
at their own wit.

IV

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of
the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French
soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of
France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the
reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their
lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to "The Empire" left
them stone--cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall,
when their heart