And then, on top of it, when you have a genuine sense of bitter injustice, when you know that your own most modest estimate of yourself is exalted compared with the estimate of the man who commands you—you begin to have black moods....
III
Harry had black moods. All these torments accumulated and broke his spirit. He lost his keenness, his cheerfulness, and his health. Once a man starts on that path, his past history finds him out, like an old wound. Some men take to drink and are disgraced. In Harry's case it was Gallipoli. No man who had a bad time in that place ever 'got over' it in body or soul. And when France or some other campaign began to work upon them, it was seen that there was something missing in their resisting power; they broke out with old diseases and old fears ... the legacies of Gallipoli.
Harry grew pale, and nervous, and hunted to look at; and he had a touch of dysentery. But the worst of the poison was in his mind and heart. For a long time, as I have said, since he felt the beginning of those old doubts, and saw himself starting downhill, he had striven anxiously to keep his name high in men's opinion; for all liked him and believed in him. He had been ready for anything, and done his work with a conscientious pride. But now this bitterness was on him, he seemed to have ceased to care what happened or what men thought of him. He had unreasonable fits of temper; he became distrustful and cynical. I thought then, sometimes, of the day when he had looked at Troy and wanted to be like Achilles. It was painful to me to hear him talking as Eustace used to talk, suspicious, intolerant, incredulous.... I thought how Harry had once hated that kind of talk, and it was most significant of the change that had come over the good companion I had known. Yet sometimes, when the sun shone, and once when we rode back into Albert and dined quietly alone, that mask of bitterness fell away; there were flashes of the old cheerful Harry, and I had hopes. I hoped Philpott would be killed....
IV
But he survived, for he was very careful. And though, as I have said, he stuck it for a long time, he was by no means the gallant fire-eater you would have imagined from his treatment of defaulters. Once round the line just before dawn was enough for him in that sort of country. 'Things are quiet then, and you can see what's going on.' He liked it best when 'things were quiet.' So did all of us, and I don't blame him for that.
But that winter there was a thick crop of S.I.W.'s. S.I.W. is the short title for a man who has been evacuated with self-inflicted wounds—shot himself in the foot, or held a finger over the muzzle of his rifle, or dropped a great boulder on his foot—done himself any reckless injury to escape from the misery of it all. It was always a marvel to me that any man who could find courage to do such things could not find courage to go on; I suppose they felt it would bring them the certainty of a little respite, and beyond that they did not care, for it was the uncertainty of their life that had broken them. You could not help being sorry for these men, even though you despised them. It made you sick to think that any man who had come voluntarily to fight for his country could be brought so low, that humanity could be so degraded exactly where it was being so ennobled.
But Philpott had no such qualms. He was ruthless, and necessarily so; but, beyond that, he was brutal, he bullied. When they came before him, healed of their wounds, haggard, miserable wisps of men, he kept them standing there while he told them at length exactly how low they had sunk (they knew that well enough, poor devils), and flung at them a rich vocabulary of abuse—words of cowardice and dishonour, which were strictly accurate but highly unnecessary. For these men were going back to duty now; they had done their punishment—though the worst of it was still to come; all they needed was a few quiet words of encouragement from a strong man to a weaker, a little human sympathy, and that appeal to a man's honour which so seldom fails if it is rightly made.
Well, this did not surprise me in Philpott; he had no surprises for me by now. What did surprise me was Harry's intolerant, even cruel, comments on the cases of the S.I.W.'s. He had always had a real sympathy with the men, he knew the strange workings of their minds, and all the wretchedness of their lives; he understood them. And yet here he was, as scornful, as Prussian, on the subject of S.I.W.'s as even Philpott. It was long before I understood this—I don't know that I ever did. But I thought it was this: that in these wrecks of men he recognized something of his own sufferings; and recognizing the disease he was the more appalled by the remedy they took. The kind of thing that had led them to it was the kind of thing he had been through, was going through. There the connection ceased. There was no such way out for him. But though it ceased, the connection was so close that it was degrading. And this scorn and anger was a kind of instinctive self-defence—put on to assure himself, to assure the world, that there was no connection—none at all.... But I don't know.