But long after the noise and the building had subsided, and from high up in the air had come a fusillade of small explosions and little puffs of smoke, where the bombs hurled up from the cellar went off in turn--Jim perceived his captain coming down the road. He had been hurled through the wall as it came down, across the road, and had landed intact on a manure heap. And it was only when he hit the colonel a stunning blow over the head with a French loaf at lunch time that they found out he was temporarily as mad as a hatter. So they got him away in an ambulance and Jim took over the company. As I say--things just happen. That night they moved up into support trenches--up that dirty, muddy road with the cryptic notices posted at various places: "Do not loiter here," "This cross-road is dangerous," "Shelled frequently," etc. And at length they came to the rise which overlooks Loos and found they were to live in the original German front line--now our support trench. They were for the front line in the near future--but at present their job was work on this support trench and clearing up the battlefield near them. Now this war is an impersonal sort of thing taking it all the way round. Those who stand in front trenches and blaze away at advancing Huns are not, I think, actuated by personal fury against the men they kill. You may pick out a fat one perhaps with a red beard and feel a little satisfaction when you kill him because his face offends you, but you don't really feel any individual animosity towards him. One gets so used to death on a large scale that it almost ceases to affect one. An isolated man lying dead and twisted by the road, where one doesn't expect to find him, moves one infinitely more than a wholesale slaughter. The thing is too vast, too overpowering for a man's brain to realise. * * * * * But of all the things which one may be called on to do, the clearing of a battlefield after an advance brings home most poignantly the tragedy of war. You see the individual then, not the mass. Every silent figure lying sprawled in fantastic attitude, every huddled group, every distorted face tells a story. Here is an R.A.M.C. orderly crouching over a man lying on a stretcher. The man had been wounded--a splint is on his leg, while the dressing is still in the orderly's hand. Then just as the orderly was at work, the end came for both in a shrapnel shell, and the tableau remains, horribly, terribly like a tableau at some amateur theatricals. Here are a group of men caught by the fire of the machine-gun in the corner, to which even now a dead Hun is chained--riddled, unrecognisable.