But now----? It is nobody's fault, but all of that has been lost, as utterly lost as the old comradeship of master and journeyman worker is lost in a mill where half the thousand hands may never have seen the employer who sits in a far-away office, perhaps in a far-away town. Two million men can never be a happy few; nor yet a band of brothers--you have to know a brother first. A man could serve six months in France and never see the general commanding his division. He could be there for four years and not know what a corps or an army commander looked like. How can you help it? Many generals did what they could--more, you might say, than they should. They left their desks and maps to visit their men in the line; they made excuses to get under fire; two or three were killed doing so; one corps commander smuggled himself into the front line of an attack by his corps. But these were escapades, strictly. The higher commands have no right to get hit. Modern war has pushed the right place for them farther and farther away from the fighting, away from the men, whom some of the higher commanders, as well as the lower, do really love with a love passing the love of women--"the dear men" of whom I have heard an officer, tied to the staff and the base by the results of head wounds, speak with an almost wailing ache of desire, as horses whinny for a friend--"Would I were with him, wheresoe'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." But how were the men to know that? Everything helped to indispose them to know it; everything went to point the contrast between their own fate and that of its distant and unknown controllers. The evolution of the war was now calling on all ranks of troops in the actual line to put up with a much diminished chance of survival, only the barest off-chance if they stayed there year after year. While they lived it was inflicting upon them in trenches a life squalid beyond precedent. And that same evolution had pressed back the chief seats of command into places where life was said to contrast itself in wonderful ways with that life of mud and stench and underground gloom.