eir own mud-bank and
scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them
out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed to me the
instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw them in the
line. In a little way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent, taking
only a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found myself
using this self-complacency. They were strafing on the left. Shells were
pitching on the right. Very nasty for the men in either of those places.
Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank
Heaven for that!

"Here," said an elderly officer--one of those rare exalted souls who
thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's
sake--"here we may be killed at any moment!"

He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged as
a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.

"But," said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, "I
don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!"

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man,
soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was
in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated
the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately,
heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he
paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly
specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the
thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke
with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of
mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement,
he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost
miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do
as he did by the passion within him--passion of love, passion of hate,
passion of fear, or passion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were
the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of
their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and
the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence in
frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their
own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously
that they were immune from shel