I notice the counterpart of my own feeling in the attitude of the drivers towards their horses. They, too, realise that for many of us, whether human or four-footed, the hour of parting is approaching fast When stables are ended and the hungry crowd is dashing for the cook-house in a greedy endeavour to collar the biggest portions, the drivers turn back to their teams to give Chum and Blighty an extra pat and to shake the hay a little loose for them. The horses sniff against the men’s shoulders and arch their necks to gaze after them with a mild wonder in their eyes. In what part of the line lies the furnace into which they mean to hurl us? Some say that we are going to join up with the French—others that the Americans will be behind us and will leap-frog us when we have crumpled up the Hun Front by our attack. There are many wild rumours, the most likely of which is that the neighbourhood of Rheims will be our jumping-off point. But to get us there they will have to entrain us; there are no signs of entraining at present. Nothing is certain, except that every night we are crawling southwards. Are we brave or merely indifferent? The Army crushes imagination and sentiment. To attain a certain object lives have to be expended—the mere lives in proportion to the worth of the object. For those who plan the game at General Headquarters death and courage are an impersonal sum in mathematics: so many men and horses in the held, of whom so many can be spared for corpses, But the sum is not impersonal for us. It consists of an infinite number of intimate computations: the little sums of what life means to us and of what our lives mean to the old men, mothers, wives, sweethearts who scan the casualty lists feverishly, hoping not to read our names among the fallen. General Headquarters cannot be expected to complicate their book-keeping by taking these bijou exercises in addition and subtraction into their immenser calculations. For us, in its most heroic analysis, the arithmetic of war is an auditing of our characters—an impartial balancing of the selfish and the noble, the cowardly and courageous in our natures. Long ago when we first enlisted, before we had any knowledge of the horrors we were to suffer, we set ourselves on record as believing that there were principles of right and wrong at stake, in the defence of which it was worth our while to die. An offensive of this magnitude is the test as to whether, with an experienced knowledge of the horrors, we are still men enough to hold to our bargain and prove our sincerity with our blood. It is the test of scarlet—the fiercest of all tests, which we encounter as heroes or avoid as moral bankrupts.