Queer, the places men go to in this war and the circumstances under which they meet! This chap went to school with me in London, I discover. I remember him chiefly by one of those inconsequential incidents of childhood; he had a hoydenish sister who laid me out by throwing a snowball with a stone in it. She’s a married woman with children now—the wife of one of the props of the upper-middle-classes. Her husband has a seat in Parliament; before the war she owned a Rolls Royce and everything else that was respectable. She’s been going up in the social scale ever since she threw that snowball. It’s by the snowball that she recalls me, her brother tells me, whenever my name is mentioned. This chap’s been to the east; he was present at the taking of Bagdad. He speaks of all that magic country as though it were just as commonplace as this desolate plain of ruined villages on which I gaze. Tonight we pull our guns out. Where we’re going nobody knows. Our infantry are already marching out in sections and the Imperials are taking over from us. Staff officers with their red tabs go up and down the trenches. Brass-hats pass down the sunken road and pop their heads in at my observation post to enquire their direction. There’s mystery and excitement in the air. They can’t be withdrawing us for a third time merely to go into training. It must be for the counter-stroke which we have so long expected. But when are we going to strike and where? I’d like to see our Captain at this moment. The whole impatience of our corps through this summer seems to be summed up in his person. Like all of us, only more so, he has listened since the spring with a kind of agony for the galloping of the black horseman who rides alone. He himself is a man who rides solitarily. His eyes have a steady forward gaze, quiet and firm and unflinching. I shouldn’t say he was a good soldier—not in details or in the ordinary sense; he came into the war, as most of us did, too late in life for that. In peace times he was a painter and a dilletante, noted for many oddities which do not matter now. He was successful and courted and on the crest of the wave. When war broke out, he downed tools at once and offered himself for cannon-fodder. In August 1914 a new way of valuing men came into fashion. Death is the sincerest of all democrats. It did not matter who we were, what our attainments, wealth, position: the chimney-sweep and the genius were of equal worth. Kreisler’s bow-arm was only of service to his country for firing a rifle. A man might have the greatest singing voice in Europe; his voice would not help. We required of him his body; it would stop a bullet. When we reached the trenches, we learnt even more dramatically that nothing that we had been counted. Only the heart that was in us could raise us above our fellows—or to use the more colloquial army term, “the guts.” Guts would enable a man to fight on when hope had retreated, until hope in very shame returned.