tionary warfare. Their boredom, the intolerable monotony
of that routine life, would be broken by more sensational drama,
and some of them were glad of that, and said: "Let's get on with it.
Anything rather than that deadly stagnation." And others, who guessed
they were chosen for the coming battle, and had a clear vision of what
kind of things would happen (they knew something about the losses at
Neuve Chapelle and Festubert), became more thoughtful than usual, deeply
introspective, wondering how many days of life they had left to them.

Life was good out of the line in that September of '15. The land of
France was full of beauty, with bronzed corn-stooks in the fields, and
scarlet poppies in the grass, and a golden sunlight on old barns and on
little white churches and in orchards heavy with fruit. It was good to
go into the garden of a French chateau and pluck a rose and smell its
sweetness, and think back to England, where other roses were blooming.
England!... And in a few days--who could say?--perhaps eternal sleep
somewhere near Lens.

Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of the little house
where I lived at that time with other onlookers. It was an untidy
garden, with a stretch of grass-plot too rough to be called a lawn, but
with pleasant shade under the trees, and a potager with raspberries
and currants on the bushes, and flower-beds where red and white roses
dropped their petals.

Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, came to gossip
with us, and read the papers, and drink a little whisky in the evenings,
and pick the raspberries. They were not professional soldiers. One of
them had been a stock-broker, the other "something in the city." They
disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred and contempt. They
hated war with a ferocity which was only a little "camouflaged" by the
irony and the brutality of their anecdotes of war's little comedies.
They took a grim delight in the humor of corpses, lice, bayonet--work,
and the sniping of fair-haired German boys. They laughed, almost
excessively, at these attributes of warfare, and one of them used to
remark, after some such anecdote, "And once I was a little gentleman!"

He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his heart--I saw him
touch the petals of living roses with a caress in his finger-tips--and
with a spiritual revolt against the beastliness of this new job of his,
although he was a strong, hard fellow, without