Food or drink are fatal in the case of grave internal wounds like this. The wounded man was racked with thirst, but all they could do was to moisten his lips from time to time with a damp handkerchief. The men in his company went about their duties with set faces, for, one and all, they loved their Captain. His servant was in despair, and watched him in his shelter. His best friend in the regiment, the Captain of another company, sat with him until evening, when he had to go to take his company back into reserve.
That night the wounded man died. One who saw him laid to rest in the little burial-ground of the battalion by a ruined farm says the grief of his men at the graveside was poignant to witness. When the dead man first took over the company it was slack and unruly, the worst company in the battalion. The new man who succeeded him told me it was the best company he had ever seen, for the spirit of the dead officer was living in every man. Such are the relations of officer and man; such are the little dramas that keep friendship green in our army in the field.
The British soldier’s indifference to danger, while it is one of his finest qualities, is often the despair of his officer. The Irish regiments are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial. An officer in one of the Irish battalions—he was a “ranker,” and therefore knew his subject—told me some amazing instances of the complete indifference of his men to the dangers of their situation. Crossing a railway on one occasion, in full view of the Germans, he came upon a party of men engaged in setting up bottles along the line. To his vigorous inquiry as to what they were doing, they disingenuously replied that they were setting up targets to shoot at from an angle of the trench! If the Germans had turned on a machine-gun down the line, not one of those men would have escaped alive.
I have had more than one experience myself of the British soldier’s indifference to danger. When I was going up to some trenches in the Ypres salient one day, the guide, a particularly stolid-looking private, stopped suddenly on a road and said: “Will you go by the road or the trench, sir?” Of course, I had not the least choice, not knowing the ground, so I asked him which was the shorter way. “The road’s a long way the shorter,” he replied. So we went by the road. But when I told the officers up at the mess in the trenches that I had come by that road they stared, and asked if we had been shelled. I said we had not. Then they told me that that particular stretch of road was one of the most “unhealthy” spots in the neighbourhood by day.
The guide was interrogated. “Some takes the road, and some the trench,” he said. “But don’t you know they are always shelling that road?” the officer asked. “They do put one over now and again,” the man replied, “but the road’s a deal shorter, sir!” “You’ll find it a short-cut to heaven one of these days, if you go on using that road,” the officer said, whereat the man grinned broadly.
The relationship between courage and discretion is always a difficult thing in war. Many lives have been lost, I fear, in this war because officers, particularly those new to the game, would not take cover when a shell came over, lest they might appear “rattled.” In point of fact, a man may often escape a wound, or perhaps even save his life, by taking refuge in a dug-out or seeking refuge behind a tree or a wall, when he hears by the diminishing speed of a shell that it is about to burst in his neighbourhood.
A very few weeks in the field, however, makes most men fatalistic about shell-fire—a man sees so often that life and death hang on a fraction of a second, on a foot this way or that. Going up to trenches one afternoon with two companions in a particularly lively part of our line, we had to cross a little bridge over a ditch. Twenty yards from this bridge was a dug-out in which the headquarters of the battalion I had come to visit was situated. I had just reached the dug-out, when I heard the slow drone of a shell. As I turned towards the direction from which the sound came the shell burst square over the bridge we had crossed less than a minute before, and two other shells fell close by within a few seconds. With the utmost satisfaction, I must admit, I dwelt on the thought that, if I had delayed for a minute to fasten a boot-lace or to light a cigarette, I should in all probability have been on that bridge just when those three shells burst there.
Two officers were following one another in cars through a ruined village close behind our lines. At the end of the village they were stopped by a military policeman, who warned them that the road was being shelled. The officer in the leading car decided that he would wait for the “strafing” to cease; the other, who was in a hurry, proceeded to his destination by another route. On arriving he found a telephone message to say that the first car had been struck square by a shell a few minutes after he had left, and that the officer and his chauffeur had been killed on the spot.
The rivet that holds the regimental officers together, their common solicitude as their common pride, are the men. The officer in the trenches is thinking continually of the men, of their safety, of their comfort, of their health, of their behaviour under fire. Get an officer talking about a “show,” and he will never tire of telling you how well the men behaved, how Private This is a most “gallant feller,” and Private That, “my best bomber,” died. “The men did d—— well,” “The men were splendid.” How often have I heard phrases like these!
Pride in their officers, pride in their regiment, flashes out quaintly in the men’s talk. Listen to a group of soldiers describing a fight.