There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious youth than to a British trench.  He will learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man.  Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and “hazing” parties need not be organized among the students.

But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches.  These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.  They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a title to manhood if they were not there.  After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England.  Their spirit and their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.

Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and purpose, as they “sit and take it,” or guard against attacks, without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour.  Borne by comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter.  A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!

For the second permissible—­periscopes are tempting targets—­I looked through one over the top of the parapet.  Another film!  A big British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet.  The dust from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke.  As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion had made.  No wise German would show himself.  British snipers were watching for him.  At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by this single “direct hit” of an h.e. (high explosive).  Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too.  Other periscopic glimpses proved it.

Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together.  Another wounded man was brought by.

“They’re bombing up ahead.  He has just been hit.”  As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his helplessness and unimportance.  One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place.  We were as conspicuously mal a propos as an outsider at a bank directors’ meeting or in a football scrimmage.  The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions were.  If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men.  We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench that were beyond the bombing action, after all.  Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer’s eye!