A nation or a people want more sea-board or more trade, so they begin to kill youth, and to torture and to burn, and God himself may ask, "Where is my beautiful flock?" No one answers. It is war. We must expect a "list of casualties." "The Germans have lost more than we have done;" "We must go on, even if the war lasts ten years;" "A million more men are needed"—thus the fools called men talk! But Youth looks up with haggard eyes, and Youth, grown old, learns that Death alone is merciful.
One sees even in soldiers' jokes that the thought of death is not far off. I said to one man, "You have had a narrow squeak," and he replied, "I don't mind if I get there first so long as I can stoke up for those Germans." Another, clasping the hand of his dead Captain, said, "Put plenty of sandbags round heaven, sir, and don't let a German through."
The other day, when the forward movement was made in France and Belgium, Charles's Regiment, the 9th Welch, was told to attack at a certain point, which could only be reached across an open space raked by machine-gun fire. They were not given the order to move for twelve days, during which time the men hardly slept. When the charge had to be made the roar of guns made speaking quite impossible, so directions were given by sending up rockets. When the rockets appeared, not a single man delayed an instant in making the attack. One young officer, in the trench where Charles was, had a football, and this he flung over the parapet, and shouting, "Come on, boys!" he and the men of the regiment played football in the open and in front of the guns. Right across the gun-raked level they kicked the ball, and when they reached the enemy's lines only a few of them were left.
Charles wrote, "I am too old to see boys killed."
Colonel Walton, with a handful of his regiment, was the only officer to get through the three lines of the enemy's trenches, and he and his men dug themselves in. Just in front of them where they paused, he saw a fine young officer come along the road on a motor bicycle, carrying despatches. The next minute a high-explosive shell burst, and, to use his own words, "There was not enough of the young officer to put on a threepenny bit." Always men tell me there is nothing left to bury. One minute there is a splendid piece of upstanding, vigorous manhood, and the next there is no finding one piece of him to lay in the sod.
A LESSON FOR TURKS
The Turks seem to have forsaken their first horrible and devilish cruelties towards English prisoners. They have been taught a lesson by the Australians, who took some prisoners up to the top of a ridge and rolled them down into the Turks' trenches like balls, firing on them as they rolled. Horrible! but after that Turkish cruelties ceased.
Our own men see red since the Canadians were crucified, and I fancy no prisoners were taken for a long time after. We "censor" this or that in the newspapers, but nothing will censor men's tongues, and there is a terrible and awful tale of suffering and death and savagery going on now. Like a ghastly dream we hear of trenches taken, and the cries of men go up, "Mercy, comrade, mercy!" Sometimes they plead, poor caught and trapped and pitiful human beings, that they have wives and children who love them. The slaughter goes on, the bayonet rends open the poor body that someone loved, then comes the internal gush of blood, and another carcase is flung into the burying trench, with some lime on the top of it to prevent a smell of rotting flesh.
My God, what does it all mean? Are men so mad? And why are they killing all our best and bravest? Our first army is gone, and surely such a company never before took the field! Outmatched by twenty to one, they stuck it at Mons and on the Aisne, and saved Paris by a miracle. All my old friends fell then—men near my own age, whom I have known in many climes—Eustace Crawley, Victor Brooke, the Goughs, and other splendid men. Now the sons of my friends are falling fast—Duncan Sim's boy, young Wilson, Neville Strutt, and scores of others. I know one case in which four brothers have fallen; another, where twins of nineteen died side by side; and this one has his eyes blown out, and that one has his leg torn off, and another goes mad; and boys, creeping back to the base holding an arm on, or bewildered by a bullet through the brain, wander out of their way till a piece of shrapnel or torn edge of shell finds them, and they fall again, with their poor boyish faces buried in the mud!
Mr. —— dined with us last night. He had been talking of his brother who was killed, and he said: "I think it makes a difference if you belong to a family which has always given its lives to the country. We are accustomed to make these sacrifices."