The Western front: a pulsating, changing line—Offensive with the British—The buoyant youth of England—Not a “good show”—English sportsmanship—A successful battalion—Psychology of the charge—“Here we are again!”—Stories of the capture—The “Keetcheenaires”—An army in the making.

Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day’s news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.

At times one thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an “all together” of a tug of war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in older days, when one king rode forth against another, became the landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.

The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged became none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms in past times when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers returning to their billets in French villages, as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.

The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course. Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.

You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where the reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is warning that peace is behind you. First, one alights near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We go across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth. The colonel comes out of the farmhouse and he sends for some other officers.

In army language, theirs had not been a “good show.” We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not “connected up” properly.

The German machine guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing the bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realised that it could not be done—later than they should, but they were a proud regiment and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier’s winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.

“A stout-hearted fighter! We had to admire him!” said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.

It was not the first time the guns had not “connected up” for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. The pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.

But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else—the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no “let-us-at-’em-again” frightfulness. In order to end this war you must “lick” one side or the other, and these men were not “licked.” One was sorry that he had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound. One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.

At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won—the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not “on,” what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been “on” for the winning battalion; perfectly “on.” They had buried the machine guns and the Germans with them.

When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until—! Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, “Please open your mouth and take this!” and you found yourself in a white, silent place full of cots.

The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They had “walked in.” They were a little surprised to be alive—thanks to the guns. “Here we are! Here we are again!” as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don’t, that is velvet. Army courage these days is highly sensitised steel in response to will.

They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, re-reading letters from home, looking at the pictures in the illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their briar-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman’s pastime and his birthright.

The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army, gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure on his wrist watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze of dust from the shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was his prisoner.

There was nothing grewsome about listening to a diffident soldier explaining how he “bombed them out,” and you shared his amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck his head out of a dugout within a foot of the face of a British soldier, who was peeping inside to see if any more Boches were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.

When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the New Army men, “the Keetcheenaires,” as the French call them, you were reminded of how, although the war was old, the British army was young. There was a “Watch our city grow!” atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seems steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making.