ool in whose faces there were two
personalities expressed: the one full of the lighthearted, reckless,
irresponsible vitality of boyhood, and the other scarred with
the anxious lines of one to whom a couple of hundred exhausted
and nerve-shattered men have looked, and not looked in vain, for
leadership and strength in their grim extremity. From a boy in such
a position is required something far more difficult than personal
courage. If we praise the boy soldier for his smile in the face of
shells and machine guns, don't let us forget to praise still more the
boy officer who, in addition to facing death on his own account, has
to bear the responsibility of the lives of a hundred other men. There
is many a man of undoubted courage whose nerve would fail to bear that
strain.

A day or two ago I was reading _Romance_, by Joseph Conrad and Ford
Madox Hueffer. It is a glorious tale of piracy and adventure in the
West Indies; but for the moment I wondered how it came about that
Conrad, the master of psychology, should have helped to write such
a book. And then I understood. For these boys who hate the war, and
suffer and endure with the smile that is sometimes so difficult, and
long with a great longing for home and peace--some day some of them
will look back on these days and will tell themselves that after all
it was Romance, the adventure, which made their lives worth while. And
they will long to feel once again the stirring of the old comradeship
and love and loyalty, to dip their clasp-knives into the same pot of
jam, and lie in the same dug-out, and work on the same bit of wire
with the same machine gun striking secret terror into their hearts,
and look into each other's eyes for the same courageous smile. For
Romance, after all, is woven of the emotions, especially the elemental
ones of love and loyalty and fear and pain.

We men are never content! In the dull routine of normal life we sigh
for Romance, and sometimes seek to create it artificially, stimulating
spurious passions, plunging into muddy depths in search of it. Now we
have got it we sigh for a quiet life. But some day those who have not
died will say: "Thank God I have lived! I have loved, and endured, and
trembled, and trembling, dared. I have had my Romance."

VI

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

I

SCENE. _A field in Flanders. All round the edge are bivouacs,
built of sticks and waterproof sheets. Three men are squatting
round a small f