“Sorry!” said Bunny.
“You keep it for the Germans, mate.”
“Oh! Oh! If I could kill this damned Kaiser with ten thousand torments!” whispered Bunny, quieting down....
These were not the only stories that tormented Bunny’s mind, but they were the chief ones. Others came in and went again—stories of the sufferings of wounded men, of almost incredible brutalities done to women and children and helpless people, and of a hundred chance reasonless horrors; they came in with an effect of support and confirmation to these two principal figures—the shrill little girl making her bitter complaint against God and the world which had promised to take care of her, and had scared her horribly and torn her limbs and thrust her, thirsty and agonized, into a stinking drain to die; and the poor puzzled lout, caught and condemned, who had to die so dingily and submissively because his heart had failed him. Against the grim instances of their sombre and squalid fates the soul of Bunny battled whenever, by night or day, thought overtook him in his essential and characteristic resolve to see life as “fun”—as “great fun.”
These two fellow-sufferers in life took possession of his imagination because of their intense kindred with himself. So far as he got his riddle clear it was something after this fashion: “Why, if the world is like this, why are we in it? What am I doing in this nightmare? Why are there little girls and simple louts—and me?”
The days drew near when he would have to go to the front. He wrote shamelessly to Joan of his dread of that experience.
“It’s the mud and dirtiness and ugliness,” he said. “I am a domestic cat, Joan—an indoor cat....
“I’ve got a Pacifist temperament....
“All the same, Joan, the Germans started this war. If we don’t beat them, they will start others. They are intolerable brutes—the Junkers, anyhow. Until we get them down they will go on kicking mankind in the stomach. It is their idea of dignified behaviour. But we are casting our youth before swine.... Why aren’t there more assassins in the world? Why can’t we kill them by machinery—painlessly and cleanly? We ought to be cleverer than they are.”
There was extraordinarily little personal fear in Bunny. He was not nearly so afraid of the things that would happen to him as of the things that would happen about him. He hated the smashing even of inanimate things; a broken-down chair or a roofless shed was painful to him. Whenever he thought of the trenches he thought of treading and slipping in the dark on a torn and still living body....