I don't myself think that any letter with deep feeling in it should ever be written with a fountain pen. Love letters should certainly never be written with one. Fountain pens and passion are mutually contradictory.
At just about this time there came a bright gleam in the darkness of our suspense. Captain Jarvice, who had been sent home with a slight shoulder wound three or four weeks before, appeared suddenly in our midst.
"You'll have the Boy home soon on his first leave," he told us. "He's getting on finely out there. He's a born soldier, that boy is, as I've always said. I'm not the only person that says so, either. The colonel says so, too. He's got great brains and great courage both together, and his men know it and will follow him anywhere. You can trust the men to know what an officer is worth."
"I hope he will never get the V.C.," I said with a shiver.
"What?" The dear captain stared at me.
"Oh, you know what I mean! Nobody honours the Victoria Cross more than I do, but it is the military form of Extreme Unction. I want him to do things that deserve it, but not to get it. Only about one man out of every hundred who get it ever lives on safely afterwards. If he doesn't die in the actual winning of it, then the Law of Compensation strikes him a little later, as in the case of Warneford. No! Dearly though I love bravery, I myself am not brave enough to want my Boy to win the Victoria Cross."
"Well, even if he doesn't happen to win it himself, he's pretty sure to be the cause of some other fellow's winning it. I tell you, he's the best soldier in the whole battalion, and if he were to be killed to-morrow without having had the chance to show all the grit that's in him—the chance to hold his trench single-handed against a horde of Germans—he'd still have done so much by his wonderful influence to stiffen up his men that they'd stand like lions, months after he was in his grave, just because of the memory of him. That's the stuff he's made of. As soon as he gets into the trench, with his gay laugh and the Life, sheer Life, breaking out of every pore of him, all the discomforts and difficulties seem to vanish."
"Hasn't he sometimes given way himself?" I asked. "Hasn't he sometimes been very tired and almost broken up?"
"Oh, yes—sometimes! But he never minds being tired himself. It was having to urge the tired men on that hurt him, and having to make them work in the trenches when they ought to have rested. He would like to do half their work for them, if he could; but as he can't, he does the next best thing—he puts heart into them to do it. Oh, he loves his men as much as they love him!"