Seldom indeed while I was at the front did I hear anyone say, "I'm afraid." How deeply and compassionately considerate Nature is to us all! She has supplied us with a store of emotional glands, and fitted us up with many a varying sensation, of which curiosity is the liveliest and strongest. Then when it comes to a race between Fear and Curiosity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred Curiosity wins hands down. In real danger our curiosity, and our unconscious but deep-seated belief in the ego, carry us right over the frightful terrors that we imagine we should feel were we thinking the thing out quietly in a safe land. Then, we tremble and shiver! Then, we remember the word "Scream." Then, we understand the meaning of fear! Then, we run (in our thoughts) into caves and cellars. But when the real thing comes we put our heads out of the windows, we run out into the streets, we go towards danger and not away from it, driven thither by the mighty emotion of Curiosity, which, when all is said and done, is one of the most delightful because the most electrifying of all human sensations.
Is this brutal? Is it hard-hearted? Is it callous, indifferent, cruel? No! For it bears no relation to our feelings for other people, it only relates to our own sensations about ourselves. When a group of wounded Belgians comes limping along, you look into their hollow, blackened faces, you feel your heart break, and all your soul seems to dissolve in one mighty longing to die for these people who have sacrificed their all for you; and you run to them, you help them all you can, you experience a passionate desire to give them everything you have, you turn out your pockets for them, you search for something, anything, that will help them.
No! You are not callous because you are curious! Quite the reverse, in fact. You are curious because you are alive, because you dwell in this one earth, and because you are created with the "sense" that you have a right to see and hear all the strange and wonderful things, all the terrors as well as all the glories that go to make up human existence.
Not to care, not to want to see, not to want to know, that is the callousness beyond redemption!
CHAPTER XXXII
THURSDAY
Thursday is a queer day, a day of no beginning and no ending.
It is haunted by such immense noise that it loses all likeness to what we know in ordinary life as "a day"—the thing that comes in between two nights.
It is, in fact, nothing but one cataclysmal bang and shriek of shells and shrapnel. The earth seems to break open from its centre every five minutes or so, and my brain begins to formulate to itself a tremendous sense of height and space, as well as of noise, until I feel as though I am in touch with the highest skies as well as with the lowest earth, because things that seem to belong essentially to earth are now happening in the skies.