At ten o’clock of a gorgeous late-summer morning the Fourth Brigade marched out from Hangest, and at high nooning of the third sun-scorched day, they dropped down a swell of that bitter plain which is Picardy into the Bois de Tailles—straggling cleft of sand and trees which strides the naked chalk and the Bray-Corbie Road. Here again—officers and men bivouacked under ground-sheets among uncleanly bushes on the slopes,—horses tethered between limbers on the red-sand floor of the valley below—they waited, waited endlessly....

For this battle was no action of sure attack, of reserves moving forward punctual to clock-time, of orderly pursuit and retreat. In that vast crucible of fire which bulged northwards astride the river from French Dompierre to English Ovilliers, Infantry Divisions of twelve thousand men shrivelled as paper shrivels in flame; brigades melted to battalions; battalions to companies: between a moonrise and a sun-setting they were and they were not. But always as Infantry Divisions shrivelled, fresh Infantry Divisions flung themselves into the crucible; and always, behind the shrivelling melting infantry, stayed the guns—stayed till human sinews could serve them no longer....

Vague echoes of those guns, hints of their flashes, were borne o’ nights to Peter Jameson as he lay sleepless among sleeping men; as he twisted over and over between the ruggled blankets on his creaking camp-bed; as he sweated away the darkness and shivered through the dawn-chill; to Peter with the spitting cough fouling his mouth and the pin-prick pain stabbing below his heart,—to Peter Jameson, one tiny glorious fool among the millions whose folly saved our world.