These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths ceaselessly. It was
a common, dreadful action. Others sat in the field hospitals in a
state of coma, dazed, as though deaf, and actually dumb. I hated to
see them, turned my eyes away from them, and yet wished that they
might be seen by bloody-minded men and women who, far behind the
lines, still spoke of war lightly, as a kind of sport, or heroic game,
which brave boys liked or ought to like, and said, "We'll fight on to
the last man rather than accept anything less than absolute victory,"
and when victory came said: "We stopped too soon. We ought to have
gone on for another three months." It was for fighting-men to say
those things, because they knew the things they suffered and risked.
That word "we" was not to be used by gentlemen in government offices
scared of air raids, nor by women dancing in scanty frocks at war-
bazaars for the "poor dear wounded," nor even by generals at G. H. Q.,
enjoying the thrill of war without its dirt and danger.

Seeing these shell-shock cases month after month, during years of
fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and
were callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting
the boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-
writers whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops and
clergy who praised God as the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies,
and had never said a word before the war to make it less inevitable;
the schoolmasters who gloried in the lengthening "Roll of Honor" and
said, "We're doing very well," when more boys died; the pretty woman-
faces ogling in the picture-papers, as "well--known war-workers"; the
munition-workers who were getting good wages out of the war; the
working-women who were buying gramophones and furs while their men
were in the stinking trenches; the dreadful, callous, cheerful spirit