Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it. How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade? Never! He would get fidgetty and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite. Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses who look after you will. I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman, who has to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the trenches are good, better than in many places where good manners are a cult. There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious youth than to a British trench. He would learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and “hazing” parties need not be organised among the students. But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare, without the signs of brutality which we associate with the prize fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting. They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilisation, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war. Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and purpose, as they “sit and take it,” or guard against attacks, without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by comrades pickaback we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!