While so many things were shaken one thing that held fast was the men's will to win. It may have changed from the first lyric-hearted enthusiasm. But it was a dour and inveterate will. At the worst most of the men fully meant to go down killing for all they were worth. And there was just a hope that in Germany, too, such default as they saw on our side was the rule; it was, perhaps, a disease of all armies and countries, not of ours alone; there might thus be a chance for us still. On that chance they still worked away with a sullen ardour that no muddling or sloth in high places could wholly damp down. Many of them were like children clinging with a cross crankiness to a hobby of learning to read in a school where some of the teachers were good, but some could not read themselves, and others could read but preferred other occupations to teaching. All were so deeply absorbed in winning that no practical upshot of all their new thoughts about England's diseases was yet, as far as I could perceive, taking shape in their minds. On that side their mood was merely one of postponement, somewhat menacing in its form, but still postponement. "We've _got_ to win first. Then----? But we've got to win first." They were almost exactly the words in which most German prisoners, till 1918, expressed their own feeling about the old rulers of Germany. CHAPTER IV TEDIUM I A book may be bad and yet tell you much. Lately I came across such a book. It is surely one of the crossest books ever written. Its author fought in France, in the ranks, for a good many months of the war. He must have been one of the men who make sergeants grey--a "proper lawyer," as Regulars call the type which a cotton district labels as "self-acting mules." I seem to know that man. He was a volunteer, but he would not enlist until conscription came in, because of some precious doctrine he had about younger men without families. When he did join his first act was to ask to speak to the colonel. He was aggrieved because army doctors would not act, when he desired it, except as such. When anyone checked him he felt an ardent thirst to "explain," and the explanation was always that he who had checked was wrong. In the field he kept a diary and sternly would he note on its recording page that tea one day--nay, on more than one--was served "very late indeed." Heinous!