William—An Englishman

by Cicely Hamilton

"No," his neighbour agreed with him jocularly; "they wouldn't have been so pleased. We thought we was all going to flap about like birds—and instead the most of us go scuttling into holes like beetles what the cook's trying to stamp on. That's flying—for them as don't fly."

"Yes," said William, "that's flying." The beetle simile caught his fancy oddly, and he found himself contrasting it with his old idea of a soldier. After all, the beetle-warrior was a new development—it was impossible to think of Napoleonic heroes as beetles. Yet if they were alive they would have to scuttle too—even Murat the magnificent, and Ney, the Red Lion ...

"When the next war comes," his jocular neighbour was continuing, "every man that ain't in the R.F.C. 'ull be crawling at the bottom of a coal-mine. And I don't mind mentioning in confidence that if I saw a coal-mine 'andy I wouldn't mind crawling down it now."

"No," said William, for the sake of speaking, "I don't suppose you would." He was trying to think of something further to say when he felt the man on his other side start perceptibly and stiffen in attention. Something caught at his throat and he could only whisper, "What is it?"

"He's stopping his engine," said the other quietly; and before William had time to ask what he meant the next bomb fell in the courtyard.

* * * * *

There was only one man wholly uninjured—the terror-haunted Wright, who ran out, splashed with other men's blood, took screaming to his heels and collapsed a mile along the road. There he lay till long after the bell of St. Nicholas had rung an "All Clear" to the town—until long after the ambulances telephoned for from the hospitals outside had loaded up in the streets across which cordons had been drawn by military police and French firemen. Men and fragments of men were taken from the ruins, some speedily, some after much search; and among them Private Tully, past terror, but breathing, still alive but only alive.

He spoke but a few times after the explosion had broken him, and the men who lifted him on a stretcher to the ambulance and out of it could see that he suffered not at all; the shifting and handling that was torture to others left his maimed and mauled body unaffected. The injury to the spine that was killing him had bereft him of the power of pain as well as of the power of movement, and in the hospital, where a few minutes' drive from the ruins landed him, he lay quietly alive for a day or two, for the most part dumb and unconscious, but with intervals of sense and lucid speech. Once, in such an interval, he whispered to the nurse that his wife, too, was buried in France; whereby she saw that he knew he was about to die.

Later he asked that some one would write to Edith Haynes, and tried to explain who she was. "No relation—just a lady I know.... I should like her to hear."

The last person he spoke to was a chaplain, a young man making his round of the ward, who, seeing intelligence in the pale blue eyes, bent over the bed to ask if there was anything he wanted. The chaplain had been warned by a sister that here was a hopeless case, and he spoke very gently and bent very low for the answer.