"How are you?" asked his division chief of staff.
"All right. Never felt better."
Then his hand went out to the wall to keep him from falling. This was the right spirit. Yet he must have rest. He could no longer command three thousand men.
One day an officer might seem fully master of himself and his task; the next day he "cracked." Superiors, breaking under the strain, were unjust to subordinates who could not carry out orders to take a series of machine-gun nests. Personal fortunes were subject to the "break in luck."
Favoring circumstances honored officers who perhaps had not done as well as those who were considered to have failed. Success was success; failure was failure. Time was precious.
"Finding that X— was not close enough up to his battalion, I immediately relieved him," was the matter-of-fact report of a colonel on a major, which meant tragedy to the major; the next day the colonel himself might "crack." The young lieutenants of platoons and companies, burdened with their instructions and maps, were the object of the accumulated pressure from senior officers. They could always charge. There was one sufficing answer to criticism—death. It came to many against impossible positions: yet not in vain. Every man who dared machine-gun fire added to the enemy's conviction of our determination to keep on driving until we had "gone through."
XXIX
THEY ALSO SERVED
From tambourine to doughnut—The "Y" and the canteen—Too much on its hands—Other ministrants—Manifold activity of the Red Cross—But not at the front—Honor to the army nurses—The chaplain's label immaterial.