" His casualties also
beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just
bluntly and simply, "Our old murderer." They disliked the necessity of
dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition
with the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited
for the explosion of a mine which afterward they had to "rush" in a
race with the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the
proceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off
by German stick-bombs or shells. "What's the good of it?" they asked,
and could find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man
listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he had
"raised hell" again.
II
The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men
settled down--knee-deep where the trenches were worst--for the winter
campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the
Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the
faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other
men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came
trickling down the slimy parapets.
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