“It’s nothing at all, me child.”
His sergeant dressed it first at the back of the firing-line, then he walked into Ypres. He went to the hospital, found it crowded—‘Lots of fellows worse than I was’—so he strolled away and had his hair cut!—“A real good shampoo and a shave, and a bath, and then a jolly good dinner!” And then he proceeded to look up some nice fellows of the Irish Horse. And in the end he went back to the hospital, and they “did him up!”
When one thinks that in peace time, if anyone had accidentally received such a wound, what a fuss there would have been! What a sending for doctors and nurses! what long faces! what lamentations, precautions, and misgivings! It makes one understand better the state of things over there. How splendidly indifferent our manhood has become to suffering! How gloriously cheap it holds life itself!
H. is happily not among those unfortunate brave men who suffer nervous distress from the sights, the scenes, and the strain of warfare, but he has a keen, almost a poetic, sensibility to the romance and tragedy of his experiences.
As he sat, those November days, in one of the deep arm-chairs before the great bricked hearth in the Villino library, a short phrase here and there would give us a picture of some episode which stamped itself upon the memory of the listener.
“Lord, it was jolty, driving along in the ambulance to the station! The poor boy next to me—badly wounded, poor chap! lost a lot of blood—he got faint and lay across my breast; went to sleep there in the end.”
“Shells? ’Pon me word, it was beautiful to see them at night! Oh, one’s all right, you know, if one keeps in one’s trenches. One of my subalterns—ah, poor lad! I don’t know what took him—he got right out of the trench and stood on the edge, stretching himself. A shell came along and bowled him over. We dug him out. He was an awfully good-looking boy. There wasn’t a scratch on him, but he was stone dead; his back broken. And there he lay as beautiful as an angel. The Colonel and I, we buried him. He was twenty-three; just married. The Colonel and I used to bury our men at night.”
Suddenly the speaker’s shoulders shook with laughter.
“Those shells! One of my fellows had one burst within a yard of him. Lord, I thought he was in pieces! He was covered in earth and rubbish! ‘Has that done for you?’ I called out to him. ‘I think it has, sir,’ he said, and you should have seen him clutching himself all over! And then there was a grin. ‘No, sir, it’s only a bruise!’ Oh, you get not to mind them, except one kind; that does make a nasty noise—a real nasty noise; it was just that noise one minded. Ugh, when you heard it coming along! Spiteful, it was!”
In the private London hospital where he spent three days the bed next to him was occupied by a Major of Artillery, wounded in the head.