It was on a cold, frosty night in spring that two staff officers, passing along his trench, halted beside him, and one of them called out:
‘Hullo!—hanged if it isn’t John Issel! Well, Jan, ’tis a wisht poor job sodgerin’, sure enough. Bain’t it now?’
Jan, standing at the salute, had a broad smile for the handsome young fellow who accosted him in the dialect of which he had lately been endeavouring to rid himself. He did not know much of Captain Haseldine, but he was proud and pleased to be recognised, and he made reply that he had nothing to complain about. Campaigning, he added, was teaching him a lot of new things.
‘Oh, it’s doing that for most of us,’ Frank Haseldine observed, laughing. ‘Even for some of our Generals.’
He went on talking for a few minutes about home affairs, remarking in an explanatory parenthesis to his companion, ‘Issel comes from our parish.’ Then he said to Jan ‘You’ll see Captain Bernard again one of these days, I hope, if we all pull through. Captain Bernard is engaged to be married to my sister Mildred.’
It was a little like being hit by a bullet—a sudden thump which made your heart stand still, yet left you erect and with an instant feeling that your first duty was to show no sign of distress. Jan showed none, and presently the two officers moved on, leaving him free to think what he would beneath his friends the blinking stars. These gave him such comfort as they had it in their power to bestow. They said it did not matter, because nothing really matters, and to that view in the abstract he could assent. But to affirm that so long as his little life might last it would not matter that somebody—he had scarcely looked at the man—was going to marry his goddess was quite vain. If the stars had asked whether he had ever imagined that he himself could marry Miss Mildred, he would naturally have answered ‘Of course not’; yet, however ridiculous and insane it might be, the truth was that he could not bear the idea of her belonging to anybody else. So what it came to, and what it had doubtless been bound to come to from the outset, was that he could not bear conditions which were altogether right, reasonable and inevitable. Jan Issel was not the first to find himself in that forlorn plight. In extreme cases it has been known to lead to suicide; in the vast majority it entails submission, more or less facile, to the decrees of destiny; for Jan it translated itself into a very fervent and genuine hope that the Germans might wipe him out. He saw now—it may have been illogical, but that made no difference to the fact—that his visions had been utterly childish, that he, an uneducated yokel, had no future and could have none, that it would be far better for him to end out there in Flanders than to be confronted some day with the dire prospect of a return to tilling the Devon fields and herding the Devon cattle.
This mood, it is true, did not endure; for he became hazily conscious that there was something contemptible in it and that a young, strong man has no business to wish himself extinguished. Nevertheless, he had more difficulty than usual in composing his next letter to Mildred, in which he made no allusion to her engagement, thinking that it would be bad manners to do so, since she had not mentioned it to him. At the end he remarked:
‘We lose men most days, and maybe my turn will come. It is good to be alive, because the world is beautiful and wonderful and because of some of the people in it; but I don’t think there can be many so happy that they should mind dying, for I can’t believe but what death means rest.’
With such persuasions he was well prepared to face what was in store for him when at length his battalion was told off to join in an engagement on a large scale. They knew very little about it beyond the fact that the British forces, after a rather prolonged spell of inaction, were about to resume the offensive and that their own special job would be to take a position facing them which was said to have been mined. That it had been mined with success was evidenced towards evening by a series of terrific explosions which seemed simply to annihilate the enemy’s defensive works; but the infantry were held back until a deluge of shell had been poured into the ruins. Then Jan and his comrades got the order to go, and away they went through the twilight smoke and dust, meeting with no opposition from the apparently broken foe. The distance that separated them from the first line of hostile trenches was traversed in no time, and that first line, or what remained of it, was occupied with ease; but in the communication trenches the Germans made a stand which resulted in hand-to-hand fighting of a really desperate nature. Of what was taking place amidst that tumult and welter and in the falling dusk Jan had only a confused notion; he supposed he must be performing his share of the task all right, because somebody sang out, ‘Well done, Issel!’ He was aware of being wounded, for the warm blood was trickling down his leg and soaking through his putties; but he felt neither pain nor weakness. Finally there came an abrupt lull. The bearded, grey-coated Germans had vanished, and he realised that the next line of trenches had been carried. He realised also, for the second time in his life, that he was quite happy. When he fell in, forming up with the remnants of his shattered battalion, he heard himself laughing aloud in sheer glee—he was as happy as that!
Was it a victory? It seemed so; yet a sudden and violent fusillade, opening upon them from their left, caused him to glance interrogatively at his neighbour. The man answered his unspoken query with a muttered ‘Enfiladed, by God!’ and immediately afterwards fell forward, groaning and swearing. But no groan came from Jan Issel, whom a bullet struck full in the heart; so that he dropped and never stirred again—only one amongst thousands who were delivered that night from the complications and bewilderments of a sick world.