ls and bullets. They walked through
harassing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so
often that some of them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until,
perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it
did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of
smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men
differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question
of difference in courage.

In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they
seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that
Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle--a few days
after--looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy
in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism in the
mass. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who
bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with whom
one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job,
the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the
bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in
this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he
had abandoned--all mingled with those other qualities of pride and
comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange
complexity of his psychology.

XV

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the
astounding belief that he was "immune" from shell-fire, and I met
other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of
desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion
had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut.
I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the
flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter
in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in
my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite--not
knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of
G.H.Q.

"Why the hell don't we get a word?" he asked. "Haven't we done as well
as anybody, died as much?"

I promised to do what I could--which was nothing--to put the matter
right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in
self-revelation.

"I have a mystical power," he said. "Nothing will ev