their lips were dry and their throats parched
in the dust, and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under the
weight of their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day, through
the beauty of that June in France, thousands of men, hundreds of
thousands to the edge of the battlefields of the Somme, where the enemy
was intrenched in fortress positions and where already, before the last
days of June, gunfire was flaming over a vast sweep of country.

V

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only
lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British
armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous
reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month
after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when
those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits
by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became
a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell back in
rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in their first
attack no more than one chance in five of escape, next time one chance
in four, then one chance in three, one chance in two, and after that
no chance at all, on the line of averages, as worked out by their
experience of luck. More boys came out to take their places, and more,
and more, conscripts following volunteers, younger brothers following
elder brothers. Never did they revolt from the orders that came to them.
Never a battalion broke into mutiny against inevitable martyrdom. They
were obedient to the command above them. Their discipline did not break.
However profound was the despair of the individual, and it was, I know,
deep as the wells of human tragedy in many hearts, the mass moved as it
was directed, backward or forward, this way and that, from one shambles
to another, in mud and in blood, with the same massed valor as that
which uplifted them before that first day of July with an intensified
pride in the fame of their divisions, with a more eager desire for
public knowledge of their deeds, with a loathing of war's misery, with
a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to
acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there
were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of
ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of
these feats the record of them is mo