re won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen
thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time,
made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the
highest toll of life and limbs.

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but
afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots,
among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with
moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, "Listen!"

Through the open door came the music of a mouth--organ, and it was
playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ,
our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine,
rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the
window-panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint,
dull rumble of distant guns.

"Christmas Eve!" said an officer. "Nineteen hundred and fifteen years
ago... and now--this!"

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was
followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in
Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of
the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and
contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few
words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades
had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the
courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the
little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its
feast-day, in places where Death had been busy--and where the spirit of
evil lay in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of
the enemy's guns. Already six hundred civilians--mostly women and
children--had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting
together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into
little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken
walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots--a French Hop o' My Thumb in
the giant's boots--was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside
the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some
Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the
benefit of English Tommies,