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But at the last they find that they fear just one thing more than they fear death and dismemberment; and that this one supremest thing is the fear that those about them may discover how terribly afraid they are. It is this greater fear, overriding all those lesser terrors, that makes over ordinary men into leaders of forlorn hopes, into holders of last ditches, into bearers of heroic blazons, into sleepers under memorial shafts erected by the citizens of a proud, a grateful and a sorrowing country. A sense of self-respect is a terrific responsibility.

Under this double stress, torn in advance of the actual undertaking by primitive emotions pulling in opposite directions, men bear themselves after curious but common fashions. To a psychologist twenty men chosen at random from the members of the battalion, waiting there in the edge of the birch thicket for their striking hour to come, would have offered twenty contrasting subjects for study.

Here was a man all deathly white, who spoke never a word, but who retched with sharp painful sounds and kept his free hand gripped into his cramping belly. That dread of being hit in the bowels which so many men have at moments like this was making him physically sick.

Here again was a man who made jokes about cold feet and yellow streaks and the chances of death and the like and laughed at his own jokes. But there was a quiver of barely checked hysteria in his laughing and his eyes shone like the eyes of a man in a fever and the sweat kept popping out in little beads on his face.

Here again was a man who swore constantly in a monotonous undertone. Always I am reading where a man of my race under strain or provocation coins new and apt and picturesque oaths; but myself, I have never seen such a man. I should have seen him, too, if he really existed anywhere except in books, seeing that as a boy I knew many steamboat mates on Southern waters and afterward met socially many and divers mule drivers and horse wranglers in the great West.

But it has been my observation that in the matter of oaths the Anglo-Saxon tongue is strangely lacking in variety and spice. There are a few stand-by oaths–three or four nouns, two or three adjectives, one double-jointed adjective–and these invariably are employed over and over again. The which was undeniably true in this particular instance. This man who swore so steadily merely repeated, times without number and presumably with reference to the Germans, the unprettiest and at the same time the most familiar name of compounded opprobrium that our deficient language yields.

For the fiftieth time in half as many minutes, a captain–his name was Captain Griswold and he was the captain of B Company–consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch where he stooped behind shelter. He spoke then, and his voice was plainly to be heard under the whistle and whoop of the shells passing over his head from the supporting batteries behind with intent to fall in the supposed defences of the enemy in front. Great sounds would have been lost in that crashing tumult; by one of the paradoxes of battle lesser sounds were easily audible.

“All right,” said Captain Griswold, “it’s time! If some damn fool hasn’t gummed things up the creeping barrage should be starting out yonder and everything is set. Come on, men–let’s go!”

They went, each still behaving according to his own mode. The man with the gripes who retched was still retching as he heaved himself up over the parapet; the man who had laughed was still laughing; the man who had sworn was mechanically continuing to repeat that naughty pet name of his for the Fritzies. Nobody, though, called on anybody else to defend the glory of the flag; nobody invited anybody to remember the Lusitania; nobody spoke a single one of the fine speeches which the bushelmen of fiction at home were even then thinking up to put into the mouths of men moving into battle.