'That's the kind of thing, I suppose. It is a medical question, really. Only the doctors don't seem to recognize—or else they aren't allowed to—any stage between absolute shell-shock, with your legs flying in all directions, and just ordinary skrim-shanking.'

'But damn it, man,' Constable exploded, 'look at the skrim-shanking you'll get if you have that sort of thing. You'd have all the mothers' darlings in the kingdom saying they'd had enough when they got to the Base.'

'Perhaps—no, I think that's silly. I don't know what it is that gives you bad wind-up after a long time out here, nerves or imagination or emotion or what, but it seems to me the doctors ought to be able to test when a man's really had enough; just as they tell whether a man's knee or a man's heart are really bad or not. You'd have to take his record into account, of course....'

'And you'd have to make it a compulsory test,' said Smith, 'because nowadays no one's going to go into a Board and say, "Look here, doctor, I've been out so long and I can't stand any more." They'd send you out in the next draft!'

'Compulsory both ways,' added Foster: 'when they'd decided he'd done enough, and wasn't safe any longer, he oughtn't to be allowed to do any more—because he's dangerous to himself and everybody else.'[1]

'As a matter of fact,' said Williams, 'that's what usually does happen, doesn't it? When a chap gets down and out like that after a decent spell of it, he usually gets a job at home—instructor at the Depot, or something.'

'Yes, and then you get a fellow with the devil of a conscience like Penrose—and you have a nasty mess like this.'

'And what about the men?' asked Constable. 'Are you going to have the same thing for them?'

'Certainly—only, thank God, there are not so many of them who need it. All that chat you read about the "wonderful fatalism" of the British soldier is so much bunkum. It simply means that most of them are not cursed with an imagination, and so don't worry about what's coming.'

'That's true; you don't see many fatalists in the middle of a big strafe.'