Philip Blair tugged at his short blond moustache and stared at his friend wistfully. “You don’t hurt me, Stacey,” he said at last. “And it’s not true that you’re not fond of us. If it were true you wouldn’t have been so honest. How do I know what they’ve done to you? You’re all—seared over. Had to be, I suppose, or die. You’ll come back to us. Now tell us about all the outside things. First with the English.”
“I was with them, first as an N. C. O., then as a lieutenant, up to June, 1917. Then I transferred to our—”
“Hold on! Hold on! You got the D. S. O. How?”
“Yes, the D. S. O. On the Somme, at Bazentin-le-Grand, for going out with ten men and cleaning up a machine-gun nest. I transferred—”
“Damn it all!” said Phil, “is that the best you can do with it? How did you do it?”
Stacey shook his head impatiently. “And then,” he went on, “as I said, I transferred to the American army and was made a captain. And I got the D. S. C. ‘for cool leadership and conspicuous bravery in action.’ ”
A sudden change came over Stacey’s face. It woke, as it were, to life—but to sinister life.
“I’ll tell you about that,” he said in a vibrant passionate voice. “I got the D. S. C. for carrying out an order that was sheer murder, for leading my company in a frontal attack against a perfectly worthless position over ground rotten with machine-guns. Not half of my men got off clear. A perfectly worthless position, I tell you, that we retired from next day because it wasn’t possible to hold and wouldn’t have done us any good if we could have held it.”
Well, there was capacity for emotion left in Stacey,—that was clear. Any one’s first impression of him would have been wrong. The question was—capacity for what emotion? A fierce chill intensity glowed in, or perhaps behind, his face. It died down as swiftly as it had kindled.
“What a—what a ghastly blunder!” Philip Blair murmured.