When the day's reports are in, all along the front, there is a
man, expert in the meaning of things, who boils them down for
that cold official digest which tells us that "There was the
usual grenade fighting at------. We made appreciable advance
at------," &c. The original material comes in sheaves and
sheaves, where individual character and temperament have full
and amusing play. It is reduced for domestic consumption like
an overwhelming electric current. Otherwise we could not take
it in. But at closer range one realizes that the Front never
sleeps; never ceases from trying new ideas and weapons which,
so soon as the Boche thinks he has mastered them, are
discarded for newer annoyances and bewilderments.
"The Boche is above all things observant and imitative," said
one who counted quite a few Boches dead on the front of his
sector. "When you present him with a new idea, he thinks it
over for a day or two. Then he presents his riposte."
"Yes, my General. That was exactly what he did to me when I
--did so and so. He was quite silent for a day. Then--he stole
my patent."
"And you?"
"I had a notion that he'd do that, so I had changed the
specification."
Thus spoke the Staff, and so it is among the junior commands,
down to the semi-isolated posts where boy-Napoleons live on
their own, through unbelievable adventures. They are
inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the
single ideal--to kill--which they follow with men as
single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist;
when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the
"victories" of the old bookish days. But there is always the
killing--the well-schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing
out and the mowing down of its occupants; the unsuspicious
battalion far in the rear, located after two nights' extreme
risk alone among rubbish of masonry, and wiped out as it eats or
washes itself; and, more rarely, the body to body encounter with
animals removed from the protection of their machinery, when the
bayonets get their chance. The Boche does not at all like
meeting men whose womenfolk he has dishonoured or mutilated, or
used as a protection against bullets. It is not that these men
are angry or violent. They do not waste time in that way. They
kill him.