up, my lads, and your heads down."

Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions in the place of
faith. "It's no good worrying," they said.

"If your name is written on a German shell you can't escape it, and if
it isn't written, nothing can touch you."

Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and superstitions
which amused them and helped them. "Have the Huns found you out yet?" I
asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. "Not
yet," said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we
were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them
ardently. They were touching wood.

"Take this with you," said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres.
"It will help you as it has helped me. It's my lucky charm." He gave
me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was so
earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer for
it.

Once in a while the men went home on seven days' leave, or four, and
then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of England
because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering, so
utterly without understanding, so "damned cheerful." They hated the
smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, "If
I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause." They
desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get
the Germans to send Zeppelins to England--to make the people know what
war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all.

From a week-end at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were
going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped away
from the pier, the M. T. O. and a small group of officers, detectives,
and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and the "revenants"
on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a widening strip of
sea.

"Back to the bloody old trenches," said a voice, and the words ended
with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards,
whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty
woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, "Do
be careful, Desmond, for my sake!" Afterward he had sat in the corner of
his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but
seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few
days later he was blown to bits by a bomb-