I tried to picture youths advancing under the smoke of artillery, through fields mowed by machine guns, dropping a moment into craters ploughed out by giant shells, creeping out under other curtains of smoke and reaching at last that other line of youths—then the thrust, the stab or the fight to the death with teeth and claws. I tried to picture young husbands and fathers and lovers, and even jolly good fellows, getting used to this—but I failed. I am an incorrigible mollycoddle.
"What is the war doing to the soldiers?" I asked. "How is it changing them most?"
"Making men of them," said the captain. "They came out little pasty-faced clerks with no lungs, no muscle, no nerve and no vision. Now they've seen life—and death—and aren't afraid of either. They have muscles and nerves of iron, and a man's outlook on life. They'll never be mere clerks or mere Londoners again."
Capt. Corcoran doesn't reminisce. He doesn't romance. Getting a war story from him is hard newspaper work; not that he isn't willing to give information, but war conditions are no longer a novelty in Europe, and heroes are so common that their stories are no longer interesting. Little by little, I learned the following facts about his record, which did not seem at all extraordinary to him:
He fought in the battles of the Aisne, Pepereign, Festubert, Hooge, St. Eloi, Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Pommier. He was wounded at Neuve Chapelle, sent to England, recovered and insisted on going back. He was wounded again at Pommier last February, two miles back of the line, when a stray shell fragment struck him in the back. The force of it hurled him to the ground in the midst of some barbed wire entanglements that caught in his forehead and tore back his scalp to the crown. A comrade clapped a cap upon his head to hold the scalp in place while he was carried to the hospital. His recovery amazed the surgeons.
Once he broke military rules by staying away from his billet all night. That night a shell struck the billet and killed his partner with whom he had been sleeping for months.
At another time, a shell split a house in which he was installing signal apparatus and killed half a dozen telegraph clerks with whom he had just been talking. He was uninjured.
III—"EVERYBODY IS A HERO"