Raleigh and I was Richard
Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life--chroniclers of passing
history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into
the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became
a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and afterward sat in
shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that death would find him,
as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with one man whom afterward
I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon when
a shell had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, and other shells
made a mess of blood and flesh in his wagon-lines. We both wore steel
hats, and he was the first to recognize a face from the world of peace.
After his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and the
Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was another officer in the
47th London Division whom I had known as a boy. He was only nineteen
when he enlisted, not twenty when he had fought through several battles.
He and hundreds like him had been playing at red Indians in Kensington
Gardens a few years before an August in 1914... The 47th London
Division, going forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose
souls had been shaped by all the influences of environment, habit,
and tradition in which I had been born and bred. Their cradle had been
rocked to the murmurous roar of London traffic. Their first adventures
had been on London Commons. The lights along the Embankment,
the excitement of the streets, the faces of London crowds, royal
pageantry--marriages, crownings, burials--on the way to Westminster,
the little dramas of London life, had been woven into the fiber of their
thoughts, and it was the spirit of London which went with them wherever
they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to
the things they saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves
on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus
before that battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of
courage.

V

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from
a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the
battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were
hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was
never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from
many points of view. It was a hideous territory, th