up a large healthy Prussian and brought him in. I told him to take him back to Battalion Headquarters, but a shot in the wood behind made me rather doubtful if he ever got his prisoner so far, and I thought it diplomatic not to ask too many questions. (This Prussian must have been a very gallant man, and, no doubt, attacked Smith with his fists or tried to bolt, preferring death to capture.) We were driven back into the wood once more by very accurate shrapnel fire (one pellet laid my ankle bone open and numbed my leg, and I thought it had been blown off), but we collected picks and shovels and resumed our old place on the hill, some fifty yards below the crest, and dug ourselves into deep holes in record time. When darkness came we linked these holes up and thus completed a trench line which we were destined to hold for a considerable time without Véry lights, barbed wire, or much support from our guns, which were now very short of ammunition. Every night the Germans made determined attacks. The weather was atrocious: we had no cover; some men had waterproof sheets, which they made capes of; some had picked up Burberrys; some had nothing at all, and it got very chilly in the early morning. Our greatest danger was the shortage of rifle oil. During one night attack in pouring rain all the rifles of my platoon jammed. We had been ordered to construct overhead cover, and had done this by laying rafters of small trees across the trench, branches on top of them and earth on top of the lot. Earth, water and mud were therefore always coming through; our vision was narrowed, and the use of the bayonet was out of the question. So when the rifles jammed, and the Germans were coming nearer and nearer, preceding each attack by heavy rifle fire, we got out of the trench and lined up behind, using the overhead cover construction as a parapet. I suppose our sudden silence or the smell' of cold steel frightened the enemy, because they soon ceased advancing, and, to our great relief, their firing gradually died away. I know in my next letter home I asked for tubes of vaseline or some tins of Rangoon oil before anything else.

We were eventually withdrawn from our advanced and dangerous position by a piece of luck. I was ordered back a few nights later with the R.S.M. to meet and guide a draft coming to join the battalion. I had been about fourteen days in the bowels of the earth, no chance of washing, shaving or sleeping, and was so stiff that I could hardly walk, and my eyes were so strained from constant gazing into the darkness that I thought I should lose my sight.

It was a pouring wet night when the R.S.M. and I went off to meet the draft, and blowing hard. I had very vague ideas of where to meet it, and now forget the name of the place. After wandering about a long time and not knowing quite if we were behind

the British lines or in front of them, we came to a house with a faint green lamp hung up outside. I went in and found it was Divisional Headquarters. I must have been something of an apparition—a Balaclava cap, hair, eyes and ears caked in mud, half a beard, and my right puttee off and boot cut open because of my sore ankle. There were several very smart staff officers inside, sitting round a table drinking port. A large fire was burning in the grate. They were most awfully good to us, and the port was excellent. They asked me who I was, my regiment, where I had come from, and what for, etc. As soon as I said my regiment was the South Wales Borderers they seemed greatly interested, and said the General must see me at once. I was, therefore, immediately ushered into a smaller room, where I found General Lomax and one or two senior officers of the staff examining a large map. The General asked me to place my finger as near as possible on the spot I had come from. I did so, and at once evolved great excitement. I gathered that we were in quite the wrong place, and the whole Third Brigade in the utmost danger and unless withdrawn that very night, it would most probably be entirely cut off. It appeared that we were at the extreme point of an inverted V, and even worse than that, because one side of the V was badly broken into, and if the other side had to give a little ground we should disappear. I suggested to the General that we were like this:

whereupon he took the pencil, and said: 'No, it's more like this,'

and drew rather a startling picture.

He then said that I was to go back with a staff officer, who would give instructions for our withdrawal at once. I told him of our very miserable plight, and how we were beating off attacks

by day and night, and the appalling conditions—just waterlogged holes. He was most genuinely sympathetic, and got up and shook my hand before I left. I saw the shell fall on his headquarters at, I think, Hooge Château, in the first Battle of Ypres, which killed most of the staff, the General succumbing to his wounds later on. The R.S.M. and I went back to our regiment in a Vauxhall landaulette. The staff officer went to Brigade Headquarters, where instructions were sent to commanding officers. I fell in with the headquarters of the Gloucesters, who very kindly gave me a berth in a most comfortable barn, and sent a messenger to tell my colonel where I was. At daylight the Brigade withdrew, and we got into line with the rest of the Division.

My regiment occupied a group of quarries, and I had an argument with a senior captain over one of them which I had been told to occupy. I had to give way to seniority, and, as fate would have it, the senior captain, his two subaltern officers, and nearly his whole company were shot down later on by a surprise night attack, when the Germans managed to get a machine gun up a woody salient and fire point-blank into the quarry. With a relief, a few changes of position, and leading a much more peaceful life, we remained in this vicinity until the French relieved us, and we departed for Belgium.

H. M. B. SALMON.

1923

THE CULT OF PESSIMISM

BRAVE men, we are told, lived before Agamemnon; and frogs undoubtedly croaked before Aristophanes immortalised their chorus of Breke-koax-koax-koax. The log that Noah kept in the Ark has, unfortunately, not come down to us. But we may conjecture that it was enlivened with a few scathing remarks on the part of the ladies concerning the discomforts of the voyage, regrets for the delightful world now, alas, engulfed by the flood, and misgivings about the dull and dreary existence which lay before them. Certainly it was the male members of the crew that sailed this floating menagerie who originated the phrase current in the British Navy from its earliest times until this day that the service is going to the devil. The Israelites in the wilderness sighed grievously for the fleshpots of Egypt, while the prospect of unlimited milk and honey in the Promised Land soon ceased to intrigue the weary sojourners in the desert. Indeed, they were not in what Voltaire styled 'ce meilleur des mondes possibles.' From Hebrew prophet to Max Nordau the pale cast of thought has centred on the glories of the past, the degradation of the present, and despair for the future. There were always 'giants in those days.' Nestor boasts to Achilles and his brothers in arms that in times past he had lived with men abler in counsel, greater in every way, than themselves, such as Pirithous and Dryas, with whom no mortal living in these degenerate days would dare to engage in combat.

κείνοισι δ ̓ ἂν οὐ τις

τῶν δὶ νῦν βροτοί εισιν ἐπιχθόνιοι μαχέοιτο.

Once, indeed, we learn from Homer that 'the smallest worm will turn being trodden on'; and the flow of depreciation, for the most part accepted without challenge, provoked from the youth of the day the sharp rejoinder that we are greatly better than our fathers.

ἡμεῖς δή πατέρων μέγ' αμείνονες εὐχόμεθ' εἶναι.

Elijah was easily convinced that all the children of Israel had gone astray, that all the prophets had been slain by the sword, and he, only he, was left. In his case the correction was promptly

supplied. There were left 7000 in Israel, all the knees which had not bowed down to Baal and every mouth which had not kissed him. Other travellers in the Slough of Despond have not been so fortunate. It has been for posterity to discover that the croaking was, after all, much ado about nothing. Cassandra's lugubrious predictions of ruin on ruin, rout on rout, confusion worse confounded, though destined to find no credence, were but too exactly fulfilled. The moral which the tradition is frequently used to point is that prophecies of evil should be readily believed. Remember Cassandra,' they tell us, and how her words were scorned, but yet came true. Take warning from this.' A strange logic to argue thus from the less to the greater, from the particular to the general. We may find in many countries and various ages countless melancholy prophecies which subsequent history has triumphantly falsified.

Fame, Milton assures us, is the last infirmity of noble minds. Did he, perhaps, mean the fame of every century but this, every country but his own? To defame the present seems to afford unqualified enjoyment to many minds, some of which have indeed been noble. Perhaps David went to the extreme of extremes in his denunciations of the world in which he lived. The Lord looked down from heaven, he insists, to see if there were any that would understand, and seek after God; but they were all gone out of the way, they were altogether become abominable; there was none that doeth good, no not one. Remarkable words these from a man whose own record was not exactly immaculate. Of Jeremiah's voluminous lucubrations this is a mild specimen: 'The land mourned and the herbs of every field withered for the wickedness of them that dwelt therein; the beasts were consumed, and the birds.' The rôle of Jeremiah is an easy one in any land, and at any time. Lucretius and Juvenal found it so. Did not Carlyle achieve greatness by ingenious manipulations of the same theme? The sage Diogenes is chiefly remembered as the man who carried a lantern in broad daylight through the streets of Athens in a vain search for an honest man. In the face of jeremiad vituperations, one is irresistibly reminded of Lord Palmerston, who, when his colleagues were wasting time in hurling invectives broadcast, said: 'Gentlemen, let us assume that everyone and everything is damned, and then get to business.' What country lacks its golden age, its good old times? To the fantastic mind of the Hindoo the existing era is the Kali Yug, the evil age, in contrast with the palmy days of an inconceivably remote past, when the children of Indra and Bhawani possessed the land, and everyone was prosperous and happy.

Virgil, Dante's adored guide, Dryden's poet who surpassed in majesty, Tennyson's loved Mantovano, lord of language,