It is their job to be cheerful, to harden their
hearts against the casualty lists, to keep out of the danger-zone
unless their presence is strictly necessary. But it is inevitable that
the men who risk death daily, the fighting-men who carry out the plans
of the High Command and see no sense in them, should be savage in
their irony when they pass a peaceful house where their doom is being
planned, and green-eyed when they see an army general taking a stroll
in buttercup fields, with a jaunty young A.D.C. slashing the flowers
with his cane and telling the latest joke from London to his laughing
chief. As onlookers of sacrifice some of us--I, for one--adopted the
point of view of the men who were to die, finding some reason in their
hatred of the staffs, though they were doing their job with a sense of
duty, and with as much intelligence as God had given them. Gen. Sir
Henry Rawlinson was one of our best generals, as may be seen by the
ribbons on his breast, and in the last phase commanded a real "Army of
Pursuit," which had the enemy on the run, and broke through to
Victory.
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