“I've got through,” was the answer, “but it's chancing one's luck.”
The officer “chanced his luck,” but did not expect to come back alive. Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.
“I had no sense of fear,” he said, “but a sort of subconscious knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious determination to go on at all costs and find out what had happened.”
He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an amiable suggestion.
“Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack upon the enemy?”
There was something in those words, “a slight attack,” which is irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.
So the cavalry did its “bit” again, though not as cavalry, and I saw some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone through that bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful word as they passed with their horses.
“It is queer,” said my friend, “how we go from this place of peace to the battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again. It is like passing from one life to another.”
In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers belonged to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy, but the foul outrage of the war—the outrage against all ideals of civilization—had made them think, some of them for the first time, about the structure of social life and of the human family.
They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper than that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had maintained the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears and alliances over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with passion or duped with lies.