Facility of this kind is not our _forte_.

Our lack of it suggests the laughter in that most delightful of recent French books, _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_, which turns upon our national taciturnities and our minimising instinct in any matter of feeling, an instinct which is like the hiding instinct, the protective colouring of birds--only anxious to be mistaken for something else.

The Englishman, when emotion compels him, speaks more readily in poetry than prose; it is the natural result of our great poetic tradition; and in the remarkable collections of war poetry written by English soldiers we have the English counterpart to the French prose utterance of the war--so much more eloquent and effective, generally, than our own.
* * * * * One more look round the slopes over which the light is fading.

The heroism of the defence!--that, here, is the first thought.

But on the part of the attackers there was a courage no less amazing, though of another sort; the effect of an iron discipline hypnotising the individual will, and conferring on the soldier such superhuman power of dying at another man's will as history--on such a scale--has scarcely seen equalled.