But of course there was no question of his being shot the next week or for a great many weeks to come. The training process through which he and other recruits had to go might have been tedious if he had not accepted it as an indispensable means towards an end, and if he had not, rather unexpectedly, found a certain pleasure in it. The monotony of drill was at least a novel species of monotony; his comrades were for the most part cheery, companionable fellows, many of whom differed sufficiently from the types hitherto known to him to stimulate his ever alert curiosity; the sergeant who instructed them in the use of the bayonet had semi-jocular anecdotes of his own experiences to relate which exhibited the grim visage of war as wreathed in smiles. Even the very real hardships and discomforts of camp life under persistent, pitiless rain were made light of by Jan, who felt himself developing into an efficient soldier day by day and who indeed was often singled out for commendation. He wrote regularly, if briefly, to the old people at the farm, regretting that there was so little to say; yet he found plenty to say to Miss Mildred. Had she not bidden him to write ‘at great length’? Those carefully composed epistles of his, which were couched in a queer mixture of dialect and high-flown language and in which words (culled from the works of some more competent manipulator of them) were occasionally used in a sense unrecognised by the dictionary, were not without pathos, as showing forth a poor mortal brimming over with ideas and impressions and struggling hard to be articulate. Let us hope that their recipient so interpreted them. Her replies, at any rate, laconic though they were, gave the utmost satisfaction to a worshipper who was duly sensible of her graciousness in deigning to reply at all.
What was not very satisfactory to Jan was that there was no talk of the battalion to which he belonged proceeding to the front. Some of the men professed to doubt whether they would ever leave the country; others had heard that they were to get marching orders in the coming summer; all were agreed that they would have to make the best of their sodden camp for several months yet. But no such trial of patience awaited Jan, who was despatched to France with a draft at very short notice early in February and who was not long left in his first halting-place some distance behind the fighting line. His impressions of life in the flooded trenches and of what it felt like to be under fire were given with great simplicity, though not without here and there a graphic touch, in the letters which he afterwards found time to write to Mildred. This war, he said, was not like any other war that he had ever heard or read of. It had had its glories, but it did not seem as if it was going to have any more. Your enemies were close at hand, but you couldn’t get at them, nor yet they couldn’t get at you. So, taken as a whole, it was not exciting. The worst part of it was the awful noise of the guns and the bursting shells, which he found more trying than the wet and cold and the ugly sights about which he was sure that his correspondent would not wish him to say much. The desolation of the ravaged country, the wrecked villages and farmhouses, the homeless peasants, the poor wandering dogs and cats—he dwelt on these and said that he seemed to be witnessing all the horrors and miseries of war without any of its grand spectacular effects. (‘Where in the world did he get “spectacular effects” from?’ Mildred smilingly wondered when she read this sentence.)
‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘it’s a singular thing that I never felt at peace like I do now. I don’t know as I can make you understand, Miss—I’m so bad at setting my meaning down—but it keeps coming over me that all’s as it should be. Particular at nights, when the clouds blow away and I can look up at the stars. This planet we live on isn’t but a very small speck, and we, scrambling about in our trenches, as it might be so many emmets, what matter how soon we’re gone and forgotten? Years and centuries pass and everything is forgotten. So why worry? And then the chaps alongside of me. We don’t talk except about common things, only I know they’re feeling the same as I do, which draws us together like. Maybe it’s because of death being always round the corner. Do you mind that poem of Kipling’s, called The Return, in one of the books you lent me? It’s wonderful true what he says⸺
“So much more near than I ’ad known,
So much more great than I ’ad guessed—
And me, like all the rest, alone—
But reachin’ out to all the rest!”
That’s just the way it strikes me, and somehow it seems to make for peace, though I couldn’t say why.’
If Jan had probed and analysed the serenity of spirit which he strove to define, he might have discovered that it arose simply from a sense that he was doing his duty; but he never quite arrived at that conclusion. What he did conclude—and found humorously puzzling—was that the place into which he had dropped was the right place for him, that he must always have been meant to be a soldier, not a poet nor an imaginative writer nor any of the fine things that he would have liked to be, but just a private in an infantry regiment. Well, even so, ambition need not be banished, and his chance of earning what Miss Mildred had said would make her proud might come any day.
He did, as the weeks slipped on, obtain sundry occasions of proving himself a capable fighter; but the affairs in which he was concerned were not important enough for public record. Save for these sporadic attacks upon the enemy, which for the most part resulted only in the loss of a considerable number of lives, there was no break in the regular routine of so many days in the trenches, followed by a period of rest in billets, whence he despatched his letters, writing them invariably with the pencil which was his most treasured possession.