“My first thought as I pulled it out was that I wanted to go home and give the war up; but then came another kind of a thought. I said, ‘The little girl wouldn’t have given that pincushion to me if she hadn’t understood that I was going off to fight for the country.’ So I said to myself, ‘Old boy, you’ve got to stand your hand pat.’ And now whenever we go into battle I always brace myself up a little by feeling in my breeches pocket and sort of shaping out that pincushion.”
From Joe: “It’s a good story, but the rest of us haven’t any pincushions. Besides that, it’s raining.” I couldn’t help observing that Joe drew that afternoon’s letter out of his pocket and fumbled it a little, while the long-legged mountaineer was straightening out his limbs and his thoughts for his share in the conversation. He said in basso profundo: “The fact is I’m always so skeered just before a fight that I can’t remember afterwards how I did feel. I know only this much, that that last three minutes before the bullets begin to whistle and the shells to howl, takes more out of me than six hours straightaway fightin’ afterwards does.”
From Joe: “There must be a lot in you at the start, then.”
There were still two men unheard from in the experience meeting. Some one of us called upon them for an expression of opinion.
“I donno. I never thought,” said one.
“Nuther did I,” said the other.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Joe.
Then the postscript philosopher, rising and stretching himself, remarked: “I reckon that if any man goes into a fight without being scared, that man is drunk or crazy.”
Then we all lay down and went to sleep.