So said the soldier-poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war⁠—as many of them are now talking⁠—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.