Yesterday, when the battery got drunk, there can be little doubt as to why it was done: the suspense of a Judgment Day for which no place or time had been allotted, made men afraid. Standish symbolizes that, terror. He could struggle with a fear which was present and which he could defeat with his hands, as he proved at Willerval; the fear, the coming of which was indefinite and the shadow of which groped only in his mind, crushed him. Perhaps the rest of us avoided his fate because we were of a coarser type. Maybe it was the very fineness of his mental qualities that tripped him up. Whatever the difference, the fact remains that he failed in the test of scarlet; at the very moment when his comrades, equally weary, equally afraid, equally in love with life, were marching out to throttle the danger, he, poor lad, was dangling from a rafter, shameful and unsightly, a self-confessed quitter and pain-dodger. Why should a man do a thing like that? He rushed upon the certainty of death, when by living he would still have retained his chance of life. All through the war such incident have happened, self-maimings, suicides, desertions—all manners of make-shift means of escaping the Judgment Day of the attack. But death is not to be avoided by running away from it; those who flee from it in the Front-line find it waiting for them behind the lines at their comrades’ hands. “I couldn’t face the Huns.” one deserter said with a kind of self-wonder, as he squared his shoulders bravely to meet the impact of the firing-squad, “but I can face this.” To my way of thinking it requires more courage to put a rope round your neck and fling yourself down from the rafters of a foul stable, or to hold yourself erect in the early dawn with your eyes blind-folded, writing without whimpering for British bullets to strike you. There must be different kinds of courage, some of which war can employ and others——Cowardice gives one the courage of desperation, so that one can calmly perform the most terrible of acts. I suppose the explanation of such men as Standish is that terror, too long contemplated, drives them mad. How much longer can the rest of us stand its contemplation?