e of fear," he said, "but a sort of subconscious knowledge
that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious
determination to go on at all costs and find out what had happened."

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the
unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when
in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an
amiable suggestion.

"Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack
upon the enemy?"

There was something in those words, "a slight attack," which is
irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench
war. But they were not spoken in jest.

So the cavalry did its "bit" again, though not as cavalry, and I saw
some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone
through that bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful word
as they passed with their horses.

"It is queer," said my friend, "how we go from this place of peace to
the battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again.
It is like passing from one life to another."

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers
belonged to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy,
but the foul outrage of the war--the outrage against all ideals of
civilization--had made them think, some of them for the first time,
about the structure of social life and of the human family.

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper
than that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had
maintained the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears
and alliances over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with
passion or duped with lies.

"The politicians are the guilty ones," said one cavalry officer. "I
am all for revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang
all politicians, diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict
impartiality."

"I'm for the people," said another. "The poor, bloody people, who are
kept in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers
desire to grab some new part of the earth's surface or to get their
armies going because they are bored with peace."

"What price Christianity?" asked another, inevitably. "What have the
churches done to stop war or preach the gospel of Christ? The Bishop of
London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all those conventional, patriotic,
cannon--