So it goes on. It's a bitter cold night. They are up nearly to their thighs in half-frozen slush. Their day's work has been entirely undone in half an hour, and has to be done over again without any interval for rest; and the supper ration's "gone West." You can hardly imagine what the loss of a meal means, with a night like that ahead of you, and occasional shells still dropping round the bit you must repair. They look awful ruffians, these chaps; caked all over with mud, hair and eyebrows and all; three or four days' stubble on their chins, and all kinds of ribaldry on their lips. They love their ease and creature comforts at least as much as any conscientious objector could; and God knows they are here as far removed from ease and creature comfort as men well could be--entirely of their own free will. And they will carry on all night, cracking their simple jokes and chaffing one another, and jostling each other to get to the front if one or two are required for anything extra dangerous. And the spirit that dictates their little jokes, isn't it as fine as any shown in bygone days by the aristocrats of France and England? If you told these fellows they were aristocrats, imagine how they'd take it! "'Ere, 'op it! Not so much of it! Wotcher givin' us?" But aren't they--bless 'em! I tell you, when I come to compare 'em with the fellows we're up against across the way; with those poor devils of machine-driven Boches, with their record of brutish murder and swinishness in Belgium--why, there's not a shadow of doubt in my mind they are real aristocrats. The war has helped to make them so, of course. But, whatever the cause, they stand out, with the splendidly gallant _poilus_ of France: true aristocrats--five hundred miles of 'em from the North Sea to Switzerland, pitted against the deluded and brutalised, machine-driven Boches. There are no officers and machine driving our fellows, or the cheery, jolly French soldiers. Held back occasionally, directed always, they may be. There's no need of any driving on our side. Unquestioning obedience to an all-powerful machine may be a useful thing in its way. I know a better, though; and that's convinced, willing, eager determination, guided--never driven--by officers who share it, and share everything else the men have and do. And that's what there is all down our side of the line, from the North Sea to Switzerland.