“A Rare Good One”
Near our trenches there were a lot of wounded, and their cries for water were pitiful. In the trenches was a quiet chap of the Engineers, who could stand it no longer. He collected all the water-bottles he could lay hold of, and said he was going out. The air was thick with shell and rifle fire, and to show yourself at all was to sign your death-warrant. That chap knew it as well as we did, but that was not going to stop him. He got to the first man all right, and gave him a swig from a bottle. No sooner did he show himself than the Germans opened fire. After attending to the first man he crawled along the ground to others until he was about a quarter of a mile away from us. Then he stood up and zigzagged towards another batch of wounded, but that was the end of him. The German fire got hotter and hotter. He was hit badly, and with just a slight upward fling of his arms he dropped to earth like the hero he was. Later he was picked up with the wounded, but he was as dead as they make them out there. The wounded men, for whose sake he had risked and lost his life, thought a lot of him, and were greatly cut up at his death. One of them, who was hit so hard that he would never see another Sunday, said to me as we passed the Engineer chap, who lay with a smile on his white face, and had more bullets in him than would set a battalion of sharpshooters up in business for themselves, “He was a rare good one, he was. It’s something worth living for to have seen a deed like that, and now that I have seen it I don’t care what becomes of me.” That’s what we all felt about it: A Corporal of the Bedfordshire Regiment.
[XVII. THE MAN AMID WAR]
War, that mad game the world so loves to play.
Swift’s “Ode to Sir William Temple.”
The combat deepens. On, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave.
Campbell’s “Hohenlinden.”
But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West.”
Everybody is brave out here, but we all pass the biscuit on to the flying-men. If ever men won a V.C. they have: An Infantry Private.