“Back to the bloody old trenches,” said a voice, and the words ended with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards, whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!” Afterward he had sat in the corner of his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb—an accident of war.)
A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, “You know who I am, don't you, sir?”
I hadn't the least idea who he was—this little ginger—haired soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name, and said the papers had “done him proud,” and that they had made a lot of him at home—presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes, though one couldn't tell it by the look of him.
“Now I'm going back to the trenches,” he said, gloomily. “Same old business and one of the crowd again.” He was suffering from the reaction of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a humming song in its stomach.
France... and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called “the same old business.” There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way down the Strand.
Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man's tunic. Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The same old business and the same old pluck.
I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward that network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few days' leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and smells which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live through the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of Flanders.
The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before, there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September afternoon. The smell of Flemish villages—a mingled odor of sun-baked thatch and bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up through the centuries—was overborne by a new and more pungent aroma which crept over the fields with the evening haze.
It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.
Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were keen, to mind its menace—those soldiers who came marching down the road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would “grouse” at the duration of the war and swear that he was “fed up” with it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the shell-shock cases.