Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/34

22 enemy was ready, too, and dysentery was raging and it was very hot, and there was little to drink, and it is a God forgotten land to fight in, so we did not win the Peninsula, nor anything else, except honor from thinking men.

I know that every man who was in Gallipoli, is and will be prouder of having been there, than of anything in his life, past, present, or to come. Our men kept a flag flying there to which the beaten men of all time will turn in trial.

As you know, in 1915, the war settled down into a struggle between opposing lines of trenches, with daily shelling and sniping and occasional raiding, mining and bombing. The next great attack was the attack on Verdun, when the enemy launched an army of specially fed, trained and rested soldiers, under a hail of shells, to break through the French lines. That attack lasted with little intermission for four months, and it did not break the line. It very nearly broke it, but not quite. Perhaps nothing can break the line of a free people sworn to hold the gates for freedom. Often in that fight, little bodies of French and German soldiers were shut off for days together by shellfire, men died from hunger and thirst in the