BATTLE IN THE HUD 289

mad: the last snatches of a lost world of colour going
into a welter of mud and desolation;

"What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns^
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bel!s5
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires."1

It was a subconscious protest of the human spirit which common
unlettered fighting men also echoed, but in blasphemies and
grim jests which no one has recorded.

Yet this people, out of whose finest minds such poetry was
rung, could not be deterred from its purpose. Their will was
equal to their task. "How to pull the English off:" wrote
Walter Page, the American Ambassador in London, ** that's a
hard thing to say, as it is a hard thing to say how to pull a bull-
dog OIL" Watching day by day the never-ceasing procession of
inquirers seeking news at the Embassy of missing sons
husbands, the Ambassador was struck by their" stoicism. "Not
a tear have I seen yet," he wrote. "They take it as part of the
price of greatness and of empire. You guess at their grief only
by their reticence. They use as few words as possible and then
courteously take themselves away. It isn't an accident that these
people own a fifth of the. world. Utterly un-warlike, they out-
last everybody else when war comes. You. don't get a sense of
fighting. here—only of endurance and. of high resolve," In
another letter Page painted the same picture, set against the
awful background of battle—of a nation "sad, dead-earnest,
resolute, united: not a dissenting voice—silent. It will spend
all its treasure and give all its men, if need be. I have never
seen such grim resolution."2

It was needed before the English came to their journey's end.
There were disasters in distant places of the earth; allies—
broken by the storm—fell away, and, as offensive after offensive
with all their high delusive hopes failed, the angel of death beat

1 Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Tmth.
8 B. J, Hendrick, Life & Letters of Walter Page*