Time after time there would come to the watching eye, to the mind still desperately hugging the hope that known causes might not bring their normal effects, the same crushing demonstration that things are as we have made them. Sometimes the line of home troops would break into gaps and bunches, lose touch and direction and common purpose, some of the knots plunging on into the back of our barrage or feasting some enemy machine-gunner on their density, others straggling back to the place whence they had started, while the Dominion troops still ambled steadily on, their line delicately waving but always continuous, closing again, as living flesh closes over a pinprick, wherever an enemy shell tore a hole. Perhaps the undersized boys from our slums and the under-witted boys from the "agricultural, residential, and sporting estates" of our auctioneers' advertisements would get to their goal, the spirit wrestling prodigies of valour out of the wronged flesh, hold on there for an hour or two with the shells splashing the earth up about them like puddle water when great rain-drops make its surface jump, and then fall back under orders, without any need, the brain of our army failing to know how to use what its muscle had won. Then, while you saw the triumphant Australians throw back a protective flank from the left of their newly-won front to the English right, far in their rear, you knew bitterly what the Australians were saying once more: "They've let us down again!" "Another Tommy officer who didn't know he'd won!" As if it were the fault, that day, of anyone there! Our men could only draw on such funds of nerve and physique, knowledge and skill, as we had put into the bank for them. Not they, but their rulers and "betters," had lost their heads in the joy of making money fast out of steam, and so made half of our nation slum-dwellers. It was not they who had moulded English rustic life to keep up the complacency of sentimental modern imitators of feudal barons. It was not they who had made our Regular Army neither aristocratic, with the virtues of aristocracy, nor democratic, with the different virtues of democracy, nor keenly professional with the professional virtues of gusto and curiosity about the possibilities of its work. _Delicta majorum immeritus lues._ Like the syphilitic children of some jolly Victorian rake, they could only bring to this harsh examination such health and sanity as all the pleasant vices of Victorian and Edwardian England had left them. III