“What’s the good? they don’t want me....”
He seemed to be repeating vaguely some childish experience of disappointment, when his eagerly proffered help was turned away with the same superciliousness of uncomprehending rebuff.
“They don’t want me. Well—I don’t want them either!” ... he was not so very much older now, after all.
“I don’t want to be English!”
No, Richard? Not even for the sake of those rows of eyes, bandaged and gutted and black-spectacled? Not even for the right to join in as those men stood at attention, and chanted in the queer flat strains peculiar to the blind:
“How can we extol thee
Who are born of thee?”...
Not even to be one of them, Richard?
“Well, I wasn’t born in England, so what does it matter?”
But he was aware, in a positive flash of knowledge, that had he been permitted to go into the trenches and fight, it would have been bang there, between the eyes, that his bullet would have caught and shattered him ... there, where the insult of the placard seemed first to have struck. He had not been allowed the choice of which blow; so how could he ever prove to this coldly, carelessly exclusive England, how the choice would unquestioningly have swung?