“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” said the Major. “I’ll stand by you if there’s trouble. Please yourself.”
We’re wondering how he’ll decide. It depends on his evidence, whether it would save or condemn her.
If it would condemn her and he still loves her——
A man can live worse deaths than falling honourably in battle.
XII
IT is wonderful to lie here in the quiet and to know that it is all ended. Already the world is saying, “Let’s forget that there was a war.” That’s natural for people fatigued by contemplating tragedy; but which is the more inconvenient—to have been a spectator or an endurer of tragedy? It’s all very well for the spectators to say, “It’s over, thank God. We’re safe now, let’s go home and be gay as we once were.” But how can we, who were comrades in the ordeal, ever forget? And the rest of the world which only watched from afar, what right has it to forget? Now that it has been saved by other men’s loss, is it its obligations that it would forget? Would it forget the pain which our bodies will always remember? Would it forget the cold, the thirst, the weariness, the wounds, the forlornness, the despairing courage which it did not share? Would it forget the dead who forewent their gladness, believing that their immortality was secured by the gratitude which would commemorate their simple heroism? If it does forget, it absconds like a blackguard debtor, cheating both us and the dead. For we fought not for victory alone, but to establish a loftier standard, so that the world in recalling the price we paid might make itself kinder and better. As I lie here in hospital, six stories up, with the throb of London beating distantly like a receding drum beneath my window, I am sometimes uncertain whether any of the scenes I have lived through ever happened. The war grows unreal and vague. Surely those ex-plumbers, ex-bricklayers, ex-piano-tuners with whom I marched, are only imagined. At this distance it seems incredible that such men should have found the fortitude to make themselves the knights of Armageddon. They were so ordinary, so ignorant of their true greatness, so blind to the magnanimous courage of their martyrdom. Ordinary, ignorant and blind they were; perhaps their indifference to their worth was their outstanding glory. Yet these everyday men proved not by ones or twos, but in their millions that the spirit of righteous freedom only slumbers. In remembering their example never again can we believe ourselves ignoble or that the race of sacrificial men is ever ended.
My little Major, with the V. C. ribbon on his breast, came on leave from Mons the other day and hopped in, merry as ever, to see me. He was at the Front when the Armistice was declared: I was eager to hear about it. “How did the men take it?” I asked him. “Like any other happening,” he said.
“But wasn’t there any excitement or cheering?”