Winterbourne could not listen any further—a zealous N.C.O. herded him back to the draft. He went unwillingly. He had been waiting eagerly for the men to get away from their time-honoured jests and speak of their real experiences. He was disappointed that these men talked in such a trivial and uninteresting way. He felt they ought to be saying important things in Shakespearian blank verse. Something adequate to their experience, to the intensity of manhood he instinctively felt in them and admired so humbly. But, of course, that was ridiculous of him. He felt that at once. Part of their impressiveness was this very triviality, their complete unconsciousness that there was anything extraordinary or striking about them. They would have been offended at the suggestion. They were ignorant of their own qualities. As Winterbourne himself rapidly merged with these men and became one of them, he lost entirely this first sharp impression of meeting a new, curious race of men, the masculine men. It was then the other people who became curious to him. He found that the real soldiers, the front-line troops, had no more delusions about the War than he had. They hadn’t his feeling of protest and agony over it all, they hadn’t tried to think it out. They went on with the business, hating it, because they had been told it had to be done and believed what they had been told. They wanted the War to end, they wanted to get away from it, and they had no feeling of hatred for their enemies on the other side of No Man’s Land. In fact, they were almost sympathetic to them. They also were soldiers, men segregated from the world in this immense barbaric tumult. The fighting was so impersonal as a rule that it seemed rather a conflict with dreadful hostile forces of Nature than with other men. You did not see the men who fired the ceaseless hail of shells on you, nor the machine gunners who swept away twenty men to death in one zip of their murderous bullets, nor the hands which projected trench-mortars that shook the earth with awful detonations, nor even the invisible sniper who picked you off mysteriously with the sudden impersonal “ping!” of his bullet. Even in the perpetual trench raids you only caught a glimpse of a few differently shaped steel helmets a couple of traverses away; and either their bombs got you, or yours got them. Actual hand-to-hand fighting occurred, but it was comparatively rare. It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, not a war of hand-weapons. The sentry gazed at dawn over a desolate flat landscape, seamed with irregular trenches, and infinitely pitted and scarred with shell-holes, thorny with wire, littered with débris. Five to ten thousand enemies were within range of his vision, and not one would be visible. For days on end he might strain his eyes, and not see one of them. He would hear them at night—clink of shovels and picks, the scream of a wounded man, even