“An embusqué job!” he said. “I’m saving my skin while the youngsters die.”
He stood outside his hut one day on a morning of battle in the Somme fields—up by Pozières. No prisoners had yet come down. He forgot my presence and stood listening to the fury of gun-fire and watching the smoke and flame away there on the ridge.
“Christ!” he cried. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I with my pals up there, getting blown to blood and pulp? Blood and pulp! Blood and pulp!”
Then he remembered me, and turned in a shamefaced way, and said, “Sorry!... I feel rather hipped to-day.”
I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners—those poor grey muddy wretches who come dazed out of the slime and shambles. Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.
“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man—a Feldwebel. “Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany is kaput?”
The German shrugged his shoulders.
“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us.”
“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.”