“One of the enemy’s regiments is annihilated. Then a second one. All this time I am pouring missiles in among them. But now the nervous feeling has left me. My soul is filled with hate, and I continue to shoot at the enemy without the least feeling of pity.
“Yet still the enemy is advancing, rushing forward and lying down in turns. I do not understand his tactics, but what are they to me? It is enough for me that I am occupying a favourable position and mowing him down like a strong man with a scythe in a clover field.
“During the first night after the battle I could not sleep a wink. All the time my mind was filled with pictures of the battlefield. I saw German regiments approaching, and myself firing right into the thick of them. Heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies of men were being flung high into the air. It was a dreadful vision.
“I was in four battles. When the second began I went into it like an automaton. Only your muscles are taxed. All the rest of your being seems paralyzed. So complete is the suspension of the sensory processes that I never felt my wound. All I remember is that a feeling of giddiness came over me, and my head began to swim. Then I swooned to the ground, and was picked up by the Medical Corps and carried to the rear.”
“_And turning to his men, Quoth our brave Henry then, ‘Though they be one to ten, Be not amazed.’_”
Most of us are old enough to remember how, when we entered upon the South African Campaign (as when we started the Crimean and other of our wars) the nation was divided against itself; passionate, bitter controversies were waged between anti-Boer and pro-Boer--between those who considered the war an unjust and those who considered it a just one. This time there has been nothing of that. Sir Edward Grey’s resolute efforts for peace proving futile, as soon as Germany tore up her obligations of honour, that “scrap of paper,” and began to pour her huge, boastedly irresistible armies into Belgium, we took up the gauge she so insolently flung to us, and the one feeling from end to end of the Empire was of devout thankfulness that our Government had so instantly done the only right and honourable thing; all political parties, all classes flung their differences behind them unhesitatingly and stood four-square at once against the common enemy. They were heartened by a sense of relief, even, that the swaggering German peril which had been darkly menacing us for years had materialised and was upon us at last, that we were coming to grips with it and should have the chance of ending it once and for ever.