er hit me as long as
I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute
belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage
unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive
shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my
intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch
with the Universal Spirit, as I am."

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he
was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another
or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that
astonished me. I envied him his particular "kink." I wished I could
cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of
knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men
of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes and knew,
and he claimed that he never made a mistake... He was sorry to possess
that second sight, and it worried him.

There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed,
although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of
the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know
they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general
belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being
the reverse side of the argument.

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many
times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the
Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our
front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette,
on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons
were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It
was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos,
and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters
located under some sand-bags in a German dug--out. All the way up to
Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of
present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs
and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried.
Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous
noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield,
with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's
hunting-ground and I hated e