the first rude blows of the war made only more precious the quiet comfort of their lives. And then something happened. It is amusing to note that Mr. Gibbs does not know what happened to him. There was no crisis, no case of conscience. He heard about Belgian women, wondered about Englishwomen, and behold him a trooper! "The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that didn't allow me to think." He thought enough thereafter.
Mr. Gibbs took his training well. It was part of his code to go through with it—the uncleanliness of food, the foulness of word and thought, the indescribably annoying tyranny of non-coms. He took it well and he got out of it promptly, so that he was never engaged as a trooper but saw his first action as an officer of artillery. The men were good to him and good to each other, for the most part; it was a volunteer army, the war was young and one suffered what one had to suffer. The flaneur was seeing life, at any rate, and if he saw it with no philosophy, his emotions were deep. At the end of a note on leave he writes: "Partir, c’est mourir un peu.—Un peu.—God!"
Mr. Gibbs's progress through the appalling blundering of Salonika to the Western Front is fairly interesting stuff. His description, of the work of a battery of guns before a raid is admirable. The record of sentiments is almost painfully amusing until at long last Mr. Gibbs comes suddenly to grips with one of the things which the harrowed imagination of civilians had foreseen long before. I mean death. Ah, yes, I suppose that when he came home on leave someone did ask him whether he had actually seen a dead German and he replied yes or no. He knew well enough that this monstrous engine which was working day and night was fed by human lives. But he was so unimaginative himself. He was like the excellent public in all countries which took comfort in a terrible word like "nibbling" because it lacked the colossal proportions of the word "push." He was willing to see it through until the time came when he had to see it face to face, and his confrontation was only a pair of boots sticking in the mud, the mortal remains of his substitute as battery commander, the man who had been killed doing Gibbs's work while he himself was by accident away.
I am glad that Mr. Gibbs put down all of his emotions, even the exceedingly little one of cursing the men who sent others out to die while they made speeches in the House of Commons. Because all
