ritish army. Something enraged
him at the sight of that shelled village.

"Damn them!" he said. "Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up
life!"

Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a minute
or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend
from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the
day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the way to Ypres. The
German gunners had wakened up again. They always did. They were getting
busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes
through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the ditch, we ate the
luncheon we had carried in our pockets.

"A silly idea!" said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his eyes.
He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and all the
boys he knew were being killed.

"What's silly?" I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was
thinking of, in a world of folly.

"Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just because
some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a
bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal
acquaintance."

"Damn silly," I said.

"That's all there is to it in modern warfare," said the lanky man. "It's
not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against
your enemy's, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and
chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when
guns kill at fifteen miles?"

Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him
show his head, and shot each head that showed.

The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again.
It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past
the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls,
past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring, as
our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres. The
enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in the
morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again... I
remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred
ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living
figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above
many dead. We three were l