“It is very horrible, this kind of warfare,” said the captain. He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. “All war is very horrible, of course.” Regular soldiers rarely take any other view. They know war.
“With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave,” I suggested.
“Oh, that arm is all right!” he replied. “This is what I am paid for”—which I had heard regulars say before. “And it is for England!” he added, in his quiet way. “Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans,” he went on. “The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can’t hate.”
Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists in war.
“Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?”
“No. We must win by fighting,” he replied. This was in March, 1915. “You know,” he went on, taking another tack, “when one gets back to England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very nice.”
“Yes. I’ve found the same after roughing it,” I agreed. “One is most particular that he has every comfort to which civilisation entitles him.”
We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing, and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or three minutes and the firing died down to silence.
Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not yet received theirs, he had none himself.
“It’s not fair to the men,” he said. “I don’t want anything they don’t have.”