VII
So Harry stayed till he was 'pushed' off, as he had promised. And I was glad he had gone like that. I had long wanted him to leave the Peninsula somehow, for I felt he should be spared for greater things, but, knowing something of his peculiar temperament, I did not want his career there to end on a note of simple failure—a dull surrender to sickness in the rest-camp. As it turned out, the accident of the digging-party, and the way in which Harry had seized his chance, sent him off with a renewed confidence in himself and, with regard to Burnett, even a sense of triumph. So I was not surprised when his letters began to reveal something of the old enthusiastic Harry, chafing at the dreary routine of the Depot, and looking for adventure again.... But I am anticipating.
They sent him home, of course. It was no good keeping any one in his condition at Egypt or Malta, for the prolonged dysentery had produced the usual complications. I had a letter from Malta, and one from the Mediterranean Club at Gibraltar, where he had a sultry week looking over the bay, seeing the ships steam out for England, he told me, and longing to be in one. For it took many months to wash away the taste of the Peninsula, and much more than the austere comforts of the hospital at Gibraltar. Even the hot August sun in the Alameda was hatefully reminiscent. Then six weeks' milk diet at a hospital in Devonshire, convalescence, and a month's leave.
Then Harry married a wife. I did not know the lady—a Miss Thickness—and she does not come into the story very much, though she probably affected it a good deal. Wives usually do affect a soldier's story, though they are one of the many things which by the absolute official standard of military duty are necessarily not reckoned with at all. Not being the president of a court-martial I did reckon with it; and when I had read Harry's letter about his wedding I said: 'We shan't see him again.' For in those early years it was generally assumed that a man returned from service at the front need not go out again (unless he wished) for a period almost incalculably remote. And being a newly married man myself, I had no reason to suppose that Harry would want to rush into the breach just yet.
But about May—that would be 1916; we had done with Gallipoli and come to France, after four months' idling in the Aegean Islands—I had another letter, much delayed, from which I will give you an extract:
'I never thought I should want to go out again (you remember we all swore we never should) but I do. I'm fed to the teeth with this place (the Depot, in Dorsetshire); nothing but company drill and lectures on march discipline, and all the old stuff. We still attack Hill 219 twice weekly in exactly the same way, and still no one but a few of the officers knows exactly which hill it is, since we always stop halfway for lunch-time, or because there's hopeless confusion.... There's nobody amusing here. Williams has got a company and swanks like blazes about 'the front,' but I think most people see through him.... My wife's got rooms in a cottage near here, but they won't let me sleep out, and I don't get there till pretty late most days.... Can't you get the Colonel to apply for me? I don't believe it's allowed, but he's sure to be able to wangle it. Otherwise I shall be here for the rest of the war, because the more you've been out the less likely you are to get out again, if you want to, while there are lots who don't want to go, and wouldn't be any earthly good, and stand in hourly danger of being sent.... I want to see France....'
I answered on a single sheet:
'All very well, but what about Mrs. P.? Does she concur?' (I told you I was a married man.)
His answer was equally brief:
'She doesn't know, but she would.'