Too late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered. Four years ago, three years ago, even two years ago, a lasting repose of beatitude might have come with that regaining of paradise! Now! The control of our armies, jealously hugged for so long and used, on the whole, to so little purpose, had passed from us, thrown up in a moment of failure, dissension and dread. While still outnumbered by the enemy we had not won; while on even terms with him we had not won; only under a foreign Commander-in-Chief, and with America's inexhaustible numbers crowding behind to hold up our old arms, had our just cause begun to prevail. And now the marred triumph would leave us jaded and disillusioned, divided, half bankrupt; sneerers at lofty endeavour, and yet not the men for the plodding of busy and orderly peace; bilious with faiths and enthusiasms gone sour in the stomach. That very night I was to hear the old Australian sneer again. The British corps on their left, at work in the twisty valley and knucklesome banks of the Somme, had failed to get on quite as fast as they and the Canadian troops on their right. "The Canadians were all right of course, but the Tommies! Well, we might have known!" They had got rid, they chuckingly said, of their own last "Tommy officers" now; they wanted to have it quite clear that in England's war record they were not involved except as our saviours from our sorry selves. IV There were other days, during the following months of worm-eaten success, when some mirage of the greater joys which we had forfeited hung for a few moments over the sand. It must be always a strange delight to an infantryman to explore at his ease, in security, ground that to him has been almost as unimaginable as events after death. There is no describing the vesture of enigmatic remoteness enfolding a long-watched enemy line. Tolstoy has tried, but even he does not come up to it. Virgil alone has expressed one sensation of the British overflow over Lille and Cambria, Menin (even the Menin Road had an end) and Bruges and Ostend, Le Câteau and Landrecies, Liège and Namur-- Juvat ire et Dorica castra Desertosque videre locos, litusque relictum. Classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant, Hic Dolopum manus, hic sævus tendebat Achilles.