Days were the same, a steady suffering. I did not know before what men could stand. We had weeks of life that formerly I would have considered fatal to adventure with through one night or day--exposure, fatigue, famine--and over all the passion for home, that slow lasting fire. I began to understand how the field-mice winter--how the northern birds live through, and what a storm, on top of a storm, means to all creatures of the north country that are forced to take what comes, when the earth tilts up into the bleak and icy gray. We forget this as men, until a war comes. But all measuring of the world had ceased for our eyes. A man must have emotions for this, and we thought our emotions dead. I wonder if it can be understood--this being shaken down to the end, this facing of life and death without a personal relation?... Crawling out of the blanket in the morning, I have met the cold--such a shock throughout, that it centered like a long pin driven in the heart. I have seen my friends go, right and left on the field--those who helped tend the fire the night before--and met their end and my own peril without a quickened pulse. Of course, I knew something was changed for me, because I had not been this way. I had even lost the love of courage--that quality of field-work that used to raise my hair, so high and pure did it seem to my eyes.... But the night came, when I heard a little man mumbling over the fire to the effect that he hated it all--that the Little Father was making monkeys of us all--and a thrill shot over me, so that I knew I was alive. Yes, there was something to that. "Sh-shh--" said I. Two others drew near, as if a bottle had been opened. And Firthus, my closest friend, gripped my arm, leaving a blue welt where his thumb had pressed. "It's as bad to say 'sh-sh--' as to say what he said," Firthus whispered. Yes, even in the coldness, there was a thrill to that. Perhaps we thrill at the first breath of that which is to come and change us over. ... For three days they had given our part of the line a different and extraordinary resistance, so that for three nights we camped in the same place. A valley was before us, and the infantry had tried to cross again and again, always meeting at a certain place in the hollows an enfilading fire from the forward low hills. We could not get enough men across to charge the emplacements.... We were mid-west of the west wing, it was said; and word came the third day that we were holding up the whole line; that the east was ready to drive through, in fact, was bending forward; that the west was marking time on our account--and here we were keeping the whole Russian invasion from spending the holidays in Budapest.