Lee,"
until one after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel
burst over them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where
they were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still
stayed in their trenches--their own attack was postponed until midday-
-and they cheered the London men, as they went forward, with cries of,
"Vivent les Angdais!" "A mort--les Boches!" It was they who saw one
man kicking a football in advance of the others.
"He is mad!" they said. "The poor boy is a lunatic!"
"He is not mad," said a French officer who had lived in England. "It
is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the
British sport."
It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he
held it for fourteen hundred yards--the best-kicked goal in history.
Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's Land. But they
were not missed then by those who went on in waves--rather, like
molecules, separating, collecting, splitting up into smaller groups,
bunching together again, on the way to the first line of German
trenches.
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