A little further away a friend who is staying with us, and the relative above mentioned, are listening with intense interest to the talk of a tall, black-moustached soldier. His face is very pale under its bronze; he is the worst of the three gas victims who have come to-day. It is only what are called the very slight cases that are treated in the hospital close by.
A much older man this, who has been many years in the army and came over with the Indian division. He has a gentle, thoughtful face. There is no resentment in his eyes—only the look of one who has seen death very close and does not forget—and a great languor, the mark of the gas. He is talking very dispassionately of our reprisals.
“Oh yes, we have used our gas, the freezing-gas! But it don’t seem hardly worth while. It draws their fire so.” Then, with an everyday smile and no more emotion in his tone than if he were descanting on a mousetrap, he goes on to describe the incredibly sudden effect of what he calls the freezing-gas, which we suppose to be the French Turpinite. “It freezes you up, so to speak, right off on the spot. You see a fellow standing, turning his head to talk to a fellow near him. He lifts his hand, maybe, in his talk like; then comes along the gas, and there he stands. You think he’s going on talking. He’s frozen dead, his arm up, looking so natural-like, same as might be me this minute. Oh, it’s quick! what you call instantaneous. But it ain’t ’ardly worth while. The Germans, you see, it draws their fire so. Two or three times we got it in among our own men—oh, by mistake, miss, of course!” This in response to the horrified ejaculation of his interlocutor. “And that didn’t seem ’ardly worth while.”
Beyond this group, again, the daughter of the house, seated on a croquet-box, is surrounded by three sprawling blue soldiers. One of them is talking earnestly to her. The others are so much engaged in a game of “Beggar my Neighbour” with three-year-old Vivi, the Belgian baby, that they do not pay the smallest attention to their companion, and yet what he is saying is horrible enough, startling enough, God knows! The speaker is a fair, pleasant-looking boy with a cocked nose, tightly curling auburn hair, and an air of vitality and energy that makes it difficult to think of him as in anything but the perfection of health. He is a territorial, and evidently belongs to that thinking, well-educated, working class that has made such a magnificent response to the country’s call.
“No, miss, we are not taking many prisoners now. No, we’re not likely to. Well, think of our case. Just one little bit out of the whole long line. They caught our sergeant—the sergeant of my company. We were all very fond of him. Well, miss, they put him up where we could all see him—top of their trench—and tortured him. Yes, miss, all day they tortured him in sight of us, and all day we were trying to get at them and we couldn’t. And when in the evening we did get at them, he was dead, miss. We were all very fond of him. We weren’t likely to give much quarter after that. And our officers”—here he smiles suddenly—“well, miss, we’re Territorials, you see. Our officers just let us loose. We’re Territorials,” he repeated. “They can’t keep us as they keep the regulars. Not in the same military way. No, miss, we didn’t give much quarter!”
Our daughter groans a little. She understands, she sympathizes, yet she regrets. She would like our men to be as absolutely without reproach as they are without fear.
“But you wouldn’t bring yourself down to the level of the Germans,” she says; “you wouldn’t cease doing right because they do wrong?”
He fixes her with bright blue eyes, and they are hard as steel.
“Your British blood will boil,” he says slowly.