And on them, too, the stars looked down, winking alike at Greeks and Trojans; just as to-night thousands of German and British faces, dull-witted or sharp, sour-faced or smiling, sad or happy, are gazing up and wondering if there is any wisdom in the world yet. Four thousand years ago? And all the time the stars in the Great Bear have been hurtling apart at thousands of miles an hour, and the human eye sees no difference. No wonder they wink at us.... And our mothers, and wives ... the women-folk--Euripides understood their views on war. Ten years they waited.... _Must_ go to bed. D---- these scuffling rats.” * * * * * Frequently I found my thoughts flying back through the years, and more especially on starlit nights, or on a breathless spring evening, to the Greeks and Romans. Life out here was so primitive; so much a matter of eating and drinking, and digging, and sleeping, and so full of the elements, of cold, and frost, and wind, and rain; there were so many definite and positive physical goods and bads, that the barrier of an unreal civilisation was completely swept away. Under the stars and in a trench you were as good as any Homeric warrior; but you were little better. And so you felt you understood him. And here I will add that it was especially at sunset that the passionate desire to live would sometimes surge up, so intense, so clamorous, that it swept every other feeling clean aside for the time. But to return to Maple Redoubt, or rather to Gibraltar, where the next entry in my diary was written. * * * * * “6th Feb. Rather an uncomfortable dug-out in Gibraltar. Yesterday was a divine day. I sat up in ‘the Fort’ most of the day, watching the bombardment. Blue sky, on the top of a high chalk down; larks singing; and a real sunny dance in the air. We watched four aeroplanes sail over, amid white puffs of shrapnel; and a German ’plane came over. I could see the black crosses very plainly with my glasses. Most godlike it must have been up there on such a morning. I felt very pleased with life, and did two sketches, one of Sawyer, another of Richards.... A dull thud, and then ‘there goes another,’ shouts someone. It reminds me of Bill the lizard coming out of the chimney-pot in _Alice in Wonderland_. Everyone gazes and waits for the crash! Toppling through the sky comes a big tin oil-can, followed immediately by another; both fall and explode with a tremendous din, sending up a fifty-foot spurt of black earth and flying débris, while down the wind comes the scud of sand-bag fluff and the smell of powder. This alternated with the 4·2’s, which come over with a scream and wait politely a second or two before bursting so inelegantly.” (I seem to have got mixed up a bit here: it was usually the canisters that “waited.”) * * * * *