“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory? Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!”

One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled corpses of Germans who had died outside their pillboxes; and when I saw dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip of whisky with them now and then before they attacked again; and groups of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.