The rest of the night passed in an endeavour to get to sleep in a sitting position on the bale of hay. From time to time one dozed off, but it was too cold, and the infernal horses would keep on pawing.
Never was a night so long and it wasn’t till eight o’clock in the morning that we ran into Hazebrouck and stopped. By this time we were so hungry that food was imperative. On the station was a great pile of rifles and bandoliers and equipment generally, all dirty and rusty, and in a corner some infantry were doing something round a fire.
“Got any tea, chum?” said I.
He nodded a Balaklava helmet.
We were on him in two leaps with extended dixies. It saved our lives, that tea. We were chilled to the bone and had only bully beef and biscuits, of course, but I felt renewed courage surge through me with every mouthful.
“What’s all that stuff?” I asked, pointing to the heap of equipments.
“Dead men’s weapons,” said he, lighting a “gasper.” Somehow it didn’t sound real. One couldn’t picture all the men to whom that had belonged dead. Nor did it give one anything of a shock. One just accepted it as a fact without thinking, “I wonder whether my rifle and sword will ever join that heap?” The idea of my being killed was absurd, fantastic. Any of these others, yes, but somehow not myself. Never at any time have I felt anything but extreme confidence in the fact—yes, fact—that I should come through, in all probability, unwounded. I thought about it often but always with the certainty that nothing would happen to me.
I decided that if I were killed I should be most frightfully angry! There were so many things to be done with life, so much beauty to be found, so many ambitions to be realized, that it was impossible that I should be killed. All this dirt and discomfort was just a necessary phase to the greater appreciation of everything.
I can’t explain it. Perhaps there isn’t any explanation. But never at any time have I seen the shell or bullet with my name on it,—as the saying goes. And yet somehow that pile of broken gear filled one with a sense of the pity of it all, the utter folly of civilization which had got itself into such an unutterable mess that blood-letting was the only way out.—I proceeded to strip to the waist and shave out of a horse-bucket of cold water.
There was a cold drizzle falling when at last we had watered the horses, fed and saddled them up, and were ready to mount. It increased to a steady downpour as we rode away in half sections and turned into a muddy road lined with the eternal poplar. In the middle of the day we halted, numbed through, on the side of a road, and watered the horses again, and snatched a mouthful of biscuit and bully and struggled to fill a pipe with icy fingers. Then on again into the increasing murk of a raw afternoon.