Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/46

34 two things are any help in the battlefield, courage and the comrade beside you.

And I know that there is no man in the French and English armies today, standing-to in the mud, waiting for death, who does not stand the steadier from the knowledge that this country stands behind him, and that the men of this country are in the line at his side.

We here are not helping in the fight; but we can help in the fight. We can build up behind those men a great wall of love and admiration and courage, so that they can feel it, and rest their backs against it when they are hard pressed.

It is as well to face the facts of the battle. We have lost a tract of France, and our old graveyards of the Somme, our huts and waterpipes, some guns and dumps of stores and a great many men.

Fortune is like that in war. When Cortes had burnt his ships, and was marching into Mexico, his men growled that they had a hard time, with little food and no rest and bloody fighting. And Cortes told them that they didn't come there to eat cakes of Utrera, but to take their luck as it came and their medicine