it stronger and is sorry that I am not going to "spike" (_kolot_) any Germans, especially as she has made up her mind that they are going to kill me. "You had better tell me what to do with your things," she says, "for you're not going on a pleasure trip"; and she reminds me of this as I start by asking, "But when you're killed, though?" I quote this because this good woman has a brother in the Siberian rifles, of whom so many are lying under the great wooden crosses outside the wrecked village of Rakitna, and no doubt she judges of my chances by his; but she talks of him with the same equanimity. Beneath all this, there is the full and silent sense of all the sacrifices that are asked and a silent pride in making them. I have never heard this take words with the peasants, though it is behind everything they say; but it comes out often with those who have any responsibility for others and most of all with any who are in close touch with the common soldier. Those speak the strongest and simplest of him, who are only telling a friend their daily experience of him; and the selflessness of his courage and endurance keeps coming back on them as something that astounds and even confounds them. All the life of the country that lies behind the line is centred in it. The nearer one comes up to the line, the more does one feel in the moral atmosphere a sense of satisfaction, of ease of mind. In the line itself all sense of self disappears, and the big band of brothers lives for its daily work and divides up everything in common. It is wonderful how far little resources can go when they are put together; one produces some chocolate, another a little store of comfits, a third hands round a flask, another supplies the cigarettes and another the matches, and a little feast is thus improvised by the half-light of a candle; all these stores are renewed at chance and are expended without reserve. But it is farthest of all from the front that the sense of the war is most painfully felt, and that because it has to seek ways of finding its satisfaction. For this it seeks continually. Every now and then, in the capitals and all the big towns, a week is set aside for some special object: for the collection of warm underwear for the men in the trenches, for Christmas presents for the troops, for the families left behind, for the widows and orphans, for the supply of means for the crippled. At these times, which are constantly recurring, every tram or train is boarded and every restaurant is traversed by the collectors, who for each donation pin on a little special badge to secure the donor from any further importunity; but the badge is quite disregarded both by donors and collectors, and one sees many who have paid their due several times over. Thus the public is taxing itself over and over again for every need that it can think of.