“An old schoolfellow of mine sent it from home—from Mannheim.”
“How did he come by it?”
He tells her. At the beginning of the last British advance his schoolfellow had been shot immediately in front of the first line of the British trenches. He had lain there for some time with the bullets whistling over his head, crying out for his mother (as men do on the battlefield if they think they are dying), when he heard an English soldier say:
“Look here, lads, I can’t listen to this chap any longer; I’m going to fetch him in.” Then the soldier had climbed over the top and dragged him down to the British trench; but in doing so he had himself been potted. The British lads had put them both into a dug-out, lying side by side, and when their advance began they had gone on and left them. How long they lay together Oskar’s schoolfellow did not know. When he came to himself he had found he was getting better, but his companion was fatally wounded. At length the brave fellow (he was a lieutenant) had tugged at his pocket, and dragged out his watch and said: “Look here, Fritz old chap, if you live to go home send this to my sister; she lives at Knockaloe.”
Mona tosses in bed all that night, gazing into the darkness with terror, after she has drawn her curtains close to shut out the light of the arc-lamps. Remembering what her father had said when she read the soldier boy’s letter, she had not shown the watch to her father, but hidden it away in a drawer. It had come to her like a reproach from the dead, and she was afraid to look at it.
All at once she asks herself why? If those two brave boys lying out there in that deserted dug-out, the one thinking of his sister at Knockaloe and the other of his mother in her German home, could be friends at the last, was it the devil that had made them so?
“Oh God, my God, why do men make wars?”