I am not good at analysing feelings and there is no purpose in trying to analyse mine. Indeed, I cannot remember exactly what my sensations were. I had no sorrow for you, as I have never had sorrow for those killed in this war. I do not suppose two men have ever been closer friends than you and I, yet I was not even sorry for myself. I remember that I turned to Bell and said half angrily: ‘I told him to take an orderly, I was always telling him to take an orderly!’
I heard Bell’s irrelevant reply, ‘Damn them Bosches, sir.’ (The men in your platoon had an affection for you, Dick.) Then together we raised you, your wet clothes frozen, your hair matted with mud, and picking up your cap and rifle from the ground, carried you slowly back to the breastwork line, and there wakened a couple of stretcher bearers.
Oh! I’m sick of this war, Dick, dully, angrily sick of it. This world can’t be anything, I know, otherwise fellows like you would be kept in it. For a week or two the fighting is all right; it is amazing, and wonderful and elemental. Then as month after month goes by, when there is nothing in your brain but making your line stronger, when you think in sand-bags and machine guns and barbed wire and bombs, when the stray shot or the casual shell kills or lacerates some sergeant or corporal whom you have had since his recruit days in your company, given C.B. to, spoken to like a father, recommended step by step for promotion and at length grown to trust and rely on—then it begins to show its beastliness and you loathe it with a prolonged and fervent intensity.
Down at the field dressing station half a mile away, the young doctor did what he could to preserve the decencies of death. I stood at the door of the little cottage and looked out into the night. I remember that my thoughts flew back to the immediate days before the war and to a night a little party of us spent at the Russian Opera at Drury Lane, when we saw that wonderful conceit ‘Coq-d’Or.’ You, your sister, I and that young Saxon friend of yours—and of your sister’s too! We had dined at The Carlton and were ever so pleased with life. We had chuckled delightedly at the mimic warfare on the stage, the pompous King, the fallen heroes. Now the mimic warfare had turned to reality and here you were—dead in a ruined Belgian cottage.
I left after a quarter of an hour and returned to the wood, my feelings numb, my brain a blank. The corduroy path seemed interminably long. Sleep was not for me that night and the morning would do to tell Peter, Dennis and Pip that you were killed. Unaccompanied by any orderly this time, I went through the breastwork line to the spot where we had found you. The impress of your body was on the ground; your loaded revolver, which for some reason or other you must have had in your hand, was lying a yard or two away. I picked it up, examined it and noticed that a round had been fired.
I wondered why. You must have aimed at somebody and that somebody must have shot back at you, and the somebody must have been close. You were not the sort of man to blaze off into the blue. I leant against a tree and tried to think the matter out. Our snipers were out on your left, so the shot could not have come from that direction, and a hundred yards on the right was the machine-gun emplacement and the first of the outworks. In between was Potsdam House, that no-man’s habitation into which, before the outskirts of the wood had become definitely ours, sometimes the German patrols had wandered and sometimes ours. We had had a working party there the night before sand-bagging the shell-shattered walls and making the place a defensive or a jumping-off spot, as one might wish.
It was almost unthinkable that any German or Germans could have reached it, for we had a listening patrol fifty yards ahead, but it was just possible that a brave man might have avoided the patrol and have done so. At the thought I made up my mind to move forward, and took my revolver from my holster. My wits suddenly became keen again, my lassitude left me, the sight of the outline of your body on the frozen mud made me angry, wild.
I had only fifty yards to go, but I went as cautiously and silently as I could. I did not intend to be killed if I could help it. I was out to avenge, not to add another life to the German bag. I chose the spot for each step with excessive care. I stopped and listened if my feet were making too much noise on the frozen ground.
Then just as I was about twenty yards from my objective I heard a sound. Stopping suddenly, I listened. Someone was talking in a confused, halting sort of way. A snatch of conversation, a long pause, and then another remark. The voice was so low that I could not make out words, but I had the impression that it was not English that was being spoken. The tone was uniform too, as though it were not two people but one speaking—a curious, pointless monologue it sounded like.
My heart was beating a little more quickly, my fingers clutched my revolver a little more tightly. I knelt down, wondering what to do. The voice came from the ruined Potsdam House, and if indeed a small German patrol had got in there it seemed foolhardy to go alone to meet them. On the other hand, it might be but one person there, though why he should be talking thus to himself I could not imagine. Anyhow, foolhardy or not, I was going to find out.