“There was not much wrong with him, poor old chap! but he had got a bit of nerve-strain. Lord, he never let me get a wink, calling out all night in his sleep: ‘D—— that mist! I can’t see the swine. A bit more to the left. Now, now, boys, now we’ve got them! Oh, damn that mist! Ha! we got them that time—got the swine!’”
The doctors who saw our soldier were rather surprised to find him so calm in his mind. They could scarcely believe he should sleep so sound at nights—that the human machine should be so little out of gear. Yet there were days when he called himself “slack,” looked ill enough, and one could see that even a short walk was a severe trial of strength.
We shall not lightly forget a funny little incident which happened upon an afternoon when he seemed peculiarly exhausted. He was sitting in his arm-chair close to the fire, looking grey and drawn, declaring that the north-east wind never agreed with him. A kindly clerical neighbour rushed in upon us. He had just heard that fifty thousand Germans had landed at Sheringham. All the troops were under orders. Despatch riders had galloped from Aldershot to stop the billeting of a regiment just arrived here. The men had started up in the middle of their dinners and begun to pack again. They were to go back to Aldershot and concentrate for the great move. Further—indisputable authority!—the Chief Constable of the county had private information of the invasion.
You should have seen our soldier! He was up out of his chair with a spring, his blue eyes blazing. All the languor, the unacknowledged stiffness and ache of his wound, were gone. If ever there was a creature possessed with the pure joy of battle it was he. How much the womenkind miss who have never seen their men leading a charge! What a vital part of a man’s character lies dormant in times of peace!
There is, we believe, a large number of people who regard this fighting spirit as a purely animal quality; recently, indeed, a certain professor delivered a lecture on the subject of wild dogs and wolves who fight in packs, with special reference to the present state of humanity. These thinkers, sitting at ease in their armchairs, placid materialists, who have never known their own souls, much less do they know those of their countrymen. What we saw in our soldier’s eyes was, we swear, the leap of the spirit—the fine steel of the soul springing out of the scabbard of the body, the fire from the clay. Carlyle has somewhere a lovely phrase anent that spark of heroism that will burn in the heart of the lowest British soldier, the poorest, dullest peasant lad, and make of him hero and martyr, enable him to face long agony and death, endure as well as charge.
So H. flung off his languor and dashed out of his armchair and sprang to the telephone to order himself a car, and presently departed, already invisibly armed, in search of—this time—an invisible foe. For the foe was invisible!
No one knew whence the scare had come; whether there were any real justification for the preparations which were certainly ordered. The regiment which had had to pack up again just as it had got into its billets, and go back to Aldershot in the very middle of its dinner, was kept under arms all night; but there was never the point of a single Pickelhaube visible on the horizon at Sheringham or elsewhere. And on examination it turned out that the “Chief Constable” of the county, that unimpeachable and alarming authority, had been none other than the local policeman, which was a comedown indeed! But the thrill was not altogether unpleasant, and we like to remember the sick soldier springing up, that St. Michael fire in his blue eyes.
In a short account written for his school magazine, H. summarizes the experiences of his own regiment at Ypres thus:
“All the officers in my company are wounded or invalided. The men are very cheerful under all the hardships and losses, and their behaviour under fire is splendid. The Brigade (5th) has been taken three times at least to ‘mend the line’ where the Germans had broken through. From October 24 to November 5 my regiment lost about 450 officers and men—mostly, thank God, wounded. The Germans can’t shoot for nuts, but their artillery fire is accurate and incessant, and the machine-guns very deadly.”