As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and said, “O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the end.” Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the duckboards... Or Montague--white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the grisly game. PART TWO. THE SCHOOL OF COURAGE EARLY DAYS WITH THE NEW ARMY I By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The “Old Contemptibles” were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still “carried on” as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into those same fields, to the same fate. The only survivors were Regular officers taken out of the fighting-lines to form the staffs of new divisions and to train the army of volunteers now being raised at home, and men who were recovering from wounds or serving behind the lines: those, and non-commissioned officers who were the best schoolmasters of the new boys, the best friends and guides of the new officers, stubborn in their courage, hard and ruthless in their discipline, foul-mouthed according to their own traditions, until they, too, fell in the shambles. It was in March of 1915 that a lieutenant-colonel in the trenches said to me: “I am one out of 150 Regular officers still serving with their battalions. That is to say, there are 150 of us left in the fighting-lines out of 1,500.”