_ Then, as the year deepened towards winter, the rains came, torrential rains such as we thought we had never known the like of before. We heard that the trenches were flooded, and that our soldiers were eating, sleeping, and fighting ankle-deep (sometimes knee-deep) in water. At night, on going to our white beds at home, we had remorseful visions of those slimy red ruts in Flanders where our boys were lying out in the drenching rain under the heavy darkness of the sky. It was hard to believe that human strength could sustain itself against such cruel conditions, and indeed it often failed.
Towards Christmas tens of thousands of our men had to be brought home to our hospitals, many of them wounded, but not a few suffering from maladies which made them unfit for military service. The accident of being asked to distribute presents enabled me to see and talk with hundreds of them. It was a sweet and exhilarating yet rather nerve-racking experience. These young fellows, who had looked on death in its most horrible aspects, having had it for their duty to kill as many Germans as possible, and then to eat and sleep as if nothing had occurred--had they been degraded, brutalized, lowered in the scale of human creatures by their awful ordeal?
The sequel surprised me. The veil of mist with which a London winter enshrouds the beginnings of night and day had only just risen when on Christmas morning I reached the wounded soldiers' ward in the first of the hospitals I visited. The sweet place was decked out with holly and mistletoe. Forty or fifty men were lying there in their beds, some bandaged about the head, a few about the face, more about the body, arms, and legs. None of them seemed to be in serious pain, and nearly all were cheerful, even bright, boyish, and almost childlike. What stories they had to tell of the inferno they had come from! It was hell, infernal hell. They would go back, of course, when they were better, and had to do so, but if anybody said he _wanted_ to go back he was telling a damn'd lie.
One boy, scarcely out of his teens, with soft, womanly eyes, light hair, and a face that made me sure he must be the living image of his mother, had had a narrow escape. After being wounded he had been taken prisoner to a farmhouse. Nobody there had done anything for him, and at length, after many hours, watching his opportunity, he had crept into the darkness and got back to the British trenches by crawling for nearly a quarter of a mile on hands and knees.
Another young soldier, an Irishman, told me a brave story, such as might have been allowed, I thought, to scratch and scrape its way through the thorn hedge of the strictest censorship. It was a story of the great days before the armies had dug themselves into the earth like rabbits. Perhaps I had heard something about it? I had. Eight hundred of his cavalry regiment had ridden full gallop into a solid block of the enemy, making a way through them as wide as Sackville Street. At length the Germans in front had dropped their rifles and held up their hands, whereupon our men had ceased to slay. But, being unable to rein in their frantic horses, they had been compelled to gallop on. Then, while their backs were turned, the treacherous Huns had picked up their rifles and fired on them from behind, killing many of our best men.
"And what did you do then?" I asked.
"Turned back and----"
"And what?"
"Took one man alive, sor."
"And the rest?"
"Left them there, sor."
"And how many of you got back?"
"Less than two hundred, sor." _