How often have we sung that, perhaps thoughtlessly, in comfort at home, but these lads had in truth sacrificed the 'vain things.' With a lump in my throat I waited for the last verse: 'Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were an offering far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my life, my soul, my all.' HOW THE ROYALS HELD THE BLUFF: AN EPISODE OF TRENCH WARFARE CHAPTER VII HOW THE ROYALS HELD THE BLUFF: AN EPISODE OF TRENCH WARFARE I _Waiting_ The beginning of March found me with a battalion of The Royals in a rather battered Belgian town. Its centre received a good deal of attention from enemy artillery, but it offered two attractions which brought in officers from divisions all around. After all, to men accustomed to living in the trenches, the atmosphere was one of almost Sabbath peace. The hall where 'The Fancies' made much of the humours of trench life to uproariously delighted audiences was crowded out night after night. You could not find anywhere greater zest and enjoyment. The striking comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the hour may snatch life from him. I thought I knew the head in front of me, and, leaning forward, saw it was my brother-in-law. It has always struck me as quaint that he, who had been with his battery for a year and a half, and I, who had been out for nine months, should have met again under such circumstances. I had pictured a stricken field and much coolness exhibited in an admittedly dramatic moment--something in line with Stanley's 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' It was comforting to find it otherwise, but, as Smee says in _Peter Pan_, it was 'galling too.' First when looking into a shop window, and now in a concert hall, in all these months of war! We said, 'Not a bad show, is it?' 'Not half bad.' But there have been some strange meetings in this war. A private in our battalion discovered his son, a boy of seventeen, in a new draft which had just come up to the line. He had run away from home and been lost to sight. The father set matters on a proper footing by thrashing his son there and then in the front trench!