But that is not
the final truth, defeat and despair. The cross-road shrines would not
look down on those groups of tramping Islanders if it were so. And as
you look back over the parados of the firing trench, across the bleached
and scarred countryside, you remember that _that_, like the scenes of
agony in the clearing station after Loos, is the plain, visible proof
that His Spirit lives in the world of men. But what a Via Dolorosa it
is, that grim ditch dug across Europe, with its crouching men behind the
snipers' plates. Strange path for the twentieth century to have to walk
in, to prove that compassion and righteousness still live.
In all this area the British soldier walks with a singular
_insouciance_. It is not simply that he is brave. He is that, supremely
so, and not least when he is very much afraid and will not show it and
carries on with his job. But there is more in it than that. There is a
kind of warlike genius in him which makes him do the right thing in the
right way, so that he appeals to humour and comradeship as well as to
gallantry. It was one of our sergeant-majors who before a battalion
attack offered L5 to the man of his company who was first in the enemy's
trench.
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