have seemed a
danger in this great white quietude. They were walking like old men,
weak-kneed, and bent under the weight of their packs and rifles.

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a cheery voice that hid the
water in his heart every one had a word and a smile in reply, and made
little jests about their drunken footsteps, for they were like drunken
men with utter weariness.

"What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?" was one man's joke.

The last of those who came back--and there were many who never came
back--were some hours later than the first company, having found it hard
to crawl along that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place where the
braziers were glowing.

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was a hero, though
his name will never be known in the history of that silent and hidden
war. And yet it was an ordinary episode, no degree worse in its hardship
than what happened all along the line when there was an attack or
counter-attack in foul weather.

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very simple men, should have
"stuck it out" with that grandeur of courage which endured all things
without self-interest and without emotion. They were unconscious of the
virtue that was in them.

XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in
those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side
of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind
the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them
up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up
a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was
concentrating "hate."

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone
messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being
shelled to pieces by long--range howitzers, or from engineers whose
working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from
a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could
not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and
piling up the casualties. It was hard to say: "Sorry!... We've got to go
slow with ammunition."

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a
new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal
increased, and while the field-