"One oughtn't to think of things like that, Quinny!"
"But if you can't help it? What terrifies me is that I might turn funk ... let my lot down!..."
"You wouldn't. You're the sort that imagines the worst and does the best. I shouldn't think of it any more if I were you. A month at Boveyhayne'll pull you all right again...."
"It's dying that I'm most afraid of. Some of these papers write columns and columns of stuff about 'glorious deaths' at the front, but it doesn't seem very glorious to me to be dead before you've had a chance to do your job ... killed like that ... blown to bits, perhaps ... so that they can't tell which is you and which is some one else!..."
Roger nodded his head. "Our journalists contrive to see a great deal of glory in war ... from Fleet Street, don't they, Quinny!"
"Sometimes," Henry proceeded, "I think that the worst kind of cowardice is to love life too much. That's the kind of coward I am. I love living. I used to cry when I was a kid at the thought that I might die and not be able to run about and look at things that I liked! And that makes you funky. You're afraid to take risks, for fear you should lose your life and have to give up the pleasure of living. I suppose that's what the Bible means when it says that 'whosoever shall lose his life, shall find it.' This hunt for security melts the marrow in your backbone!..."
"Perhaps," said Roger. "Where you go wrong, I think, is in imagining that courage consists in hurling yourself recklessly on things ... in not caring a damn. I don't think that that's courage ... it's simply insensibility ... a sort of permanent imperceptiveness. Really, Quinny, if you don't feel fear, there's not much of the heroic in your acts. That kind of man isn't much braver when he's plunging at Germans than he is when he's plunging at a motor-omnibus or getting into a 'scrum' at Rugger. He simply doesn't see any difference. It's something to plunge at, and so he plunges. I haven't much faith in the Don't-Care-a-Damn Brigade. They're more anxious to get V. C's than to get victories. Their courage is just egoism ... they're thinking, not of their country, but of themselves. The real hero, I think, is the man who makes himself do something that he's afraid to do, who goes into a thing, trembling with fright, but nevertheless goes into it. Did you ever meet Léon Lorthiois?" he said quickly.
"You mean the French painter who used to hang about the Café Royal?" Henry replied.
"Yes. He was killed the other day in France."
"I hadn't heard. Poor chap!"