Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee”     

       We were trying to bluff it out to all the sleeping country that we didn’t care and rather liked dying.     

       The base-port across the Channel at which we landed was in strange contrast to London’s haggard smiling. It not only did not care, but it totally ignored the fact that “our backs were to the wall.”       Nothing had changed since we had seen it last. People were no cheerier, no duller. They had the same bored air of carrying on with what they obviously regarded as “a hell of a job". The dug-out Colonels and Majors, who handed us our transportation, were just as fussily convinced as ever that they alone were conducting the war. On the journey up the line the only signs of menace were trench-systems hastily thrown up far back of where any had been before, a rather unusual amount of new ordnance on trucks and the greater frequence of hospital trains, hurrying towards the Channel. The idea that we were soon to be corpses began to fade; we played cards more assiduously that we might keep normal. Now and then, as we passed towns, we looked out of the window. We began to recognise the names of stations and to guess at the part of the Front to which we were going. We ceased guessing; we knew at last.     

       “So he’s attacking the Viny Ridge,” we thought.     

       It was a year since our Corps had captured it: if the capturing of it had been a bloody affair, the defending of it against overwhelming odds would be twice as bloody. In imagination I could smell the horror of the unburied dead of Farbus and see the galloping of the shells, like the hoofs of invisible cavalry, up the road from Willerval. The fallen victors of last year’s fight would be stirring in their shallow graves and pushing their bones above the ground in protest.     

       All this I saw as I journeyed and played cards.... And when I got here I found that it was to this I was returning—to this intolerable inertia of watching. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe". Brave words! But we have neither advanced, nor fallen. In utter weariness, but with purpose unbroken, other men are crawling into battle on their hand and knees before Amiens, while we sit still, with the indignity of not dying upon us.     

  

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