The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly
failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it
spoke in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things
which were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-
men, asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the
soldiers they led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter,
laughing with despairing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who
had been lured on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German
weakness, and looking ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as
this which would lead only to other salients, after desperate and
futile endeavor.
Part Four
A WINTER OF DISCONTENT
I
The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled
hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men--ours and the
enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies
of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and
their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem
likely to go on forever.
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