'And that was what you were doing when you were seen—er, running to the dug-out?'
'Yes, sir.'
Well, the Court did not believe it, and I cannot blame them. For I knew that Harry was not being perfectly ingenuous. I knew that he could not have gone on....
Yet it was a reasonable story. And if the Court had been able to imagine themselves in Harry's condition of mind and body, crouching in the wet dark under that bank, faint with weariness and fear, shaken with those blinding, tearing concussions, not knowing what they should do, or what they could do, perhaps they would have said in their hearts, 'I will believe that story.' But they could not imagine it. For they were naturally stout-hearted men, and they had not seen too much war. They were not young enough.
And, indeed, it was not their business to imagine that....
Another of the Court asked: 'Is it true to say, as Private Mallins said, that you had—ah—lost your nerve?'
'Well, sir, I had the wind-up pretty badly; one usually does at that corner—and I've had too much of it.'
'I see.'
I wondered if he did see—if he had ever had 'too much of it.'
Harry said nothing about Burnett; nothing about Philpott; probably it would have done no good. And as he told me afterwards, 'The real charge was that I'd lost my nerve—and so I had. And I don't want to wangle out of it like that.'