THE rest of the battery caught us up this morning in our copse which we tenant with the dead. We are resting to-day, holding the line in depth, while the troops who were behind us yesterday, have passed through us and beyond. Far out in the blue we can catch the rapid thud of their drum-fire. With them it is, as it was with us yesterday, thirst, heroism, cruelty, magnanimity mingling in an ecstatic trance, while the August woods drip scarlet with men’s triumphant carelessness of dying. From here the orchestra of murder has passed, leaving as record of its passage the brief putrescence of the earthly part of sacrifice guarded by the shadowy sunlit silence.

Is it worth it? What does it all mean, this furious display of homicidal passion? It’s easy for the armchair crusaders who sit at home to prate about the glory of war. One glimpse at the landscape on which I gaze would bruise their lips with reality and wash the mountebank valour with tears from their eyes. We who have seen war for what it is, will always speak of it as the filthiest of jobs, fit only for human orang-outangs or maniacs. A woman risks her life that a man may be born. It takes twenty-five long years of love to build his mind and spirit into manliness. What glory can there be in tearing the carefully planned strength of nations barbarously limb from limb in a second? This war may have been unavoidable, but our political and journalistic prophets have no right to dress it up to appear what it is not—war is an unclean orgy of jungle-cannibals revelling in the obscenity of entrails and blood. Half the time it is not even brave; there is nothing brave in smothering a front-line with shells which are fired from miles behind the danger; there is nothing brave in overwhelming a demoralized enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

Yesterday we slaughtered men like vermin and with as little thought. We were urged on by an impelling rage, which made us almost divine in our destroying eloquence. What we did was right; the feeling I have to-day is only the reaction of disgust. That I should be able to feel disgust and yet go on fighting, proves more than anything else the righteousness of our cause.

We shall win the war for freedom, but at what, a cost! If the British, who have already perished, were to march twenty abreast from sunrise to sunset, it would take them ten days to pass a given point. It would take the French eleven days, the Russians five weeks, the whole of the Allied dead two and a half months, and the skeletons of the fallen enemy six weeks more. If all the armies of men of whatever nations who have died fighting since August, 1914, were to march in review, twenty abreast, before the grand-stand of the living, it would take them four months to pass. This would not include the old men, women and children who have perished from disease and privation, from military brutalities, from the sinking of ships and the haphazard cruelties of shell-fire and bombs. Yet despite the tremendous thought of such a procession, the actual pathos of one man smashed in battle is more appalling.

Comparatively few people have seen that sight. If they had, the war would end tomorrow. The generals who plan our battles rarely see it; they are too far back. The war-correspondents who describe our battles do not see it; they collect their information second-hand at canteens, dressing-stations and Army Headquarters. Our civilians only read the correspondents’ descriptions. So it goes—the mere hands through which the news passes and the further back it travels, the more the vileness of the happening becomes misted over with lies and transmuted into something magnificent. Each informant, in the proportion that he is removed from the terror, is the more anxious to pose as an heroic eye-witness. The only eye-witnesses are the men who do the dying, and they do not feel themselves to be heroes. They are under fire on account of the accidents of medical fitness, youth and a properly developed sense of duty. They are people of inferior rank and of no social or military consequence. They are not literary, oratorical, articulate. Because they die, the world never learns what war is like. Even though they bear charmed lives and survive, they are muzzled by Army orders and the vigilance of the censor. Not a whimper of the truth escapes. In hospital or on leave they are eager to forget; moreover, they quickly learn that the Sir Galahad misconceptions of civilians make their facts sound like the whimperings of cowards. So they strike the attitude which is required of them, pretending that there’s a sporting fascination about blowing and being blown into atoms.

I glance up from my writing. Wherever my eyes wander they dwell on some shocking detail of defiled beauty or tattered flesh. From the shadow of trees and through parted grass, faces which yesterday were vivacious with health, stare vacantly at me growing green and yellow. They are more still than the sleepers of a Rip Van Winkle land. Their shoulders are bunched, their knees drawn up, their hands clenched. Beside them little piles of paper flutter or dance away like white butterflies drifted through the sunshine. The wind stoops over them like an invisible rag-picker, curiously fingering the scattered pages.

Early this morning some of the troops who passed through us to the fight, ransacked the pockets of their fallen comrades. The objects of their search were mainly matches and cigarettes, but in some cases they exchanged boots and puttees. I suppose they argued that you cannot rob a man who is dead; he has no further use for his possessions. Sooner or later some one is bound to rob him; that being the case, there is no one who can do it with less offence than men who are shortly to die themselves. Nevertheless it’s a strange and brutal logic, for these very men may themselves be equally stark and incapable of resentment by sundown. Moreover, they showed an unnecessary callousness in their borrowing, when they scattered letters from sweethearts, wives and mothers to the four winds of heaven. In peace-times we keep the memory of our friends alive with flowers; in war, the moment the breath has left a comrade’s body he ceases to be human and becomes the victim of disrespect.

What a chamber of horrors one day’s fighting has made of these woods! No human ingenuity can compete with the diabolical inventiveness of death. No two postures are alike in this array of corpses; each one strikes a different note of agony. Why should we have come so far, from Canada, Australia and the wideness of the world, to create this French landscape into such a slaughter-house? Why above all things, should we still be willing to hand over our bodies to add one touch more to its martyred picturesqueness? We must be drunk with visions so to carve out of living flesh the image of our despotic idealism. Saints or devils, whichever we are, war has made us more than men.

My mind is full of thoughts of Tubby. He has not returned. There is no news of him. He will not return now. He may be a prisoner. He may be lying up forward wounded. He may be sprawled on the ground, like one of these pitiful waxworks by which I am surrounded. Probably we shall never know his fate. Why did he come to the war? What hidden spark of divinity kindled his spirit to a flame? He never let us inspect anything but the earthy side of his nature. His faults, had he lived to be middle-aged, would probably have hardened into vices. He was typical of us—an ordinary, pleasant chap, a trifle specked with blackguardism, impatient of ideals and yet following in their tracks. His worst weakness was his unbalanced attitude towards women; his kindest quality that he was invariably good-tempered and generous. If he realised the possession of a soul, he never talked about it. His last recorded utterance, according to the tank-officer, was an undignified catch-phrase of the streets, “How’s your father?” Yet, incredible, lovable man, he rode out wounded to die for others as simply as if he had hailed from Nazareth.

We know nothing of each other, we men who eat and sleep, and suffer, and die together. How little we know was illustrated for me by what I learnt from that newspaper, picked out of a dead man’s pocket this morning.

The first I heard of a woman in Heming’s life was that day on the Somme when, thinking he was about to die, he asked me to write to Mrs. Percy Dragott. From time to time after that I saw her portrait in the English illustrated weeklies and gathered that she was playing with war work, taking part in charitable theatrical performances, bazaars for the mutilated, garden-parties for the blinded, etc.,—having a thoroughly enjoyable time and acquiring a reputation for patriotic fervour. The next occasion when her name cropped up was when the Major read aloud to Heming the unconcluded account of a tragedy. In the paper which I found this morning, I read that she was on trial for murder.

Mrs. Percy Dragott, it seemed, had arrived in London with no credentials several years before the outbreak of war, bringing with her an elderly husband, to whom she had been recently married, who had just retired from an appointment in the Indian Civil Service. At first by her charity, then by her beauty and finally by her brilliancy she had won for herself a place in London society. At the end of two years her husband, having served his purpose, had died, leaving her free to take full advantage of her popularity. She was emphatically a man’s woman and had found a ready welcome wherever brains were an asset, being particularly sought after by men in public life. Her little house in Mayfair, run with extravagant taste, though no one troubled to enquire where the money came from, had become a kind of salon. The names of the men to whom she had been rumoured to be about to become engaged would take two hands to reckon; they included artists, journalists, soldiers and at least one statesman. On looking back, a fact was brought to light which had escaped notice, namely that over all the men with whom she had been associated she seemed to have spread a blight—in one way or another, after dropping her acquaintance, they had each one failed. Yet until the murder had occurred, no breath of scandal had touched her. Even now the crime would never have been discovered had not the murdered man proved to be a British secret service agent.

Colonel Barton, as he had called himself, had been introduced to her as a somewhat romantic figure. The account he had given of himself was that he had been captured at Gallipoli and had made a sensational escape from a Turkish prison-camp. For the first time she, who had earned for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London, seems to have been fired with passion. Whether she actually fell in love or had only feigned to do so because she scented danger, it was impossible to say. The man’s case was plain; he had pretended to be infatuated with her in order that he might trap her. He had evidently learnt all that he wanted to know and was on the point of exposing her to the authorities, when he was found dead in his flat.

At first his death was taken to be an accident. It seemed that he had fainted and in falling had caught himself a heavy blow on the left temple. But when the rooms were searched, it was found that they had been already ransacked. Nothing that could be traced had been removed, but the thief had been identified as a woman by an initialed handkerchief, which she had left behind her. Moreover she had failed to discover all the papers which condemned her; lying full in sight on the desk was an unsealed, unaddressed envelope, containing the complete history which would have led to her arrest. The contention of the police was that Barton had been done to death by the popular and charitable society beauty.

Upon investigation she was proved to be a British subject in the Hun employ. Her motives for having turned traitor and spy were said to have been inspired by her resentment at the injustice of her birth; she was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman of title, had been well-educated, kept always abroad in the care of strangers and had been given to understand through her father’s lawyers that the moment she tried to hold direct communication with her father’s family her income would end. How much of this Dragott knew when he married her was not certain. He was a kindly, honourable, wellborn man and had arrived at an age when men attain a wise leniency of view towards social accidents. He became extremely fond of her and brought her back to England. She saw her native country for the first time in his company, and she saw it as a spy in the pay of Germany. After her husband’s death, it was German money which had maintained the elegant extravagance of the little house in Mayfair.

Up to this point her story called more for sympathy than condemnation. If she, an Englishwoman, was England’s enemy, it was the unkindness of English laws that had made her that. The loneliness and family ostracism of her girlhood, when combined with her more than ordinary beauty of body and brilliancy of mind, had warped her nature into a bitter desire to be revenged. How much her husband or any of her subsequent suitors had guessed of her real occupation it was difficult to establish; but there was evidence which indicated that more than one of them had suspected. She herself had made the statement that long before her husband’s death she had tried to break off her relations with Berlin, but had been compelled to continue them under threats. Her war-philanthropies had not been entirely camouflage; in particular a hospital, which she had established in France, had been the attempt of an unquiet conscience to make atonement. But she had found it impossible to disentangle herself from the web of intrigue in which she was caught. Whatever she did, whether her intentions were good or bad, was converted into a means of gathering information for the enemy. She emphatically denied that she had had any accomplices; none of the men who had been in love with her had wilfully betrayed their official secrets. It was because she had not wished to involve others in her own tragedy that she had persistently refused all offers of marriage, earning for herself the reputation of being the coldest woman in London. Above all things she denied that she had had anything to do with Barton’s death.

From the tone of the press it was evident that, in spite of the violent hatreds of war-times, a good deal of popular sympathy was felt for her. This was no doubt partly accounted for by her reckless endeavours to save her friends at the expense of incriminating herself still further. All the indiscreet conversations and confidences which had taken place across her table were being remembered and brought into the evidence. Some of the biggest and most trusted men in public life would shortly find themselves in the witness-box. Among the small fry Heming was mentioned as one of her admirers.

I’m wondering about Heming and trying to piece the little I know of his relations with her together. I’m sure he was in love with her to the point of marrying her; I believe she was in love with him to the point of confessing why she could not consent. His proposal must have taken place between the time when he was so severely wounded at Vimy and his unexpected return to the Front this Spring. It’s since his return that he has been so changed, so that we’ve all felt in our bones that he had come back for only one reason—to die. Poor Heming, all this summer while he’s been waiting for a soldier’s death to solve life’s complications, he must have been struggling between his instinct to protect this woman and his duty to betray her. I understand now his tenderness to Suzette and her child, who is also illegitimate.

If Heming does not know this latest development, it must be kept from him. There’ll be little chance of his seeing papers so long as the offensive lasts, with its stealth and night-marches. When whatever is left of the battery marches out to rest, he may be lying quietly, like Tubby, in some deserted wood beyond all caring. Tubby’s horrid little worry was quickly forgotten—in the flash of a second.

Poor Tubby, with his cheerful grin and his, “How’s your father?”

I must speak to the Major about Heming and get him to help me to keep him in ignorance.

Just as I had finished writing this sentence I looked up to see Suzette and Heming disappearing into the wood where our horse-lines are hidden. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that she’s infatuated with him; wherever he goes, though her feet stay still, her eyes and her heart follow. She’s still a woman in her every movement, despite her Tommy’s uniform. And Heming, what are his feelings? Is he using her as a means to drug memory? Or does she restore to him a chivalrous belief that he was in danger of losing? He never commits himself and rarely speaks to her except to give orders. Queer motives urge men to become heroes. What stories we should have if every man told honestly the reasons that sent him here! One has committed a sin; another has entrusted his heart to the wrong woman. They ride out into the hell of Judgment Day laughing, and perish insolently, that in their last moments they may appear again magnificent to themselves.