“. . . all with a tendency to group about in the sociable area of the cookers where they stood, dropping brief words in confirmation of the narratives of the garrulous few, weary to exhaustion, eager for food and for rest, but for the while content with the negative joys of being merely out of it.
“It is now that are told stories that will perhaps never be told again, for on his return from the line slowly but surely the civilian habit of mind reasserts itself, standards that are based on the sanctity of human life and which are at variance with the grim necessities of the hop-over, assume their normal control. I assume that in many cases good soldiers will no more talk in the decencies of civil life of things they have had to do in war than they will practise them there. . . .”
Back to the Waggon Lines after Polygon Wood.
Lightly Wounded at a Menin Road Dressing Station.
“. . . . A brush had been passed over all the faces of these wounded, wiping out differences of expression, of character and intelligence; leaving them with something of the facial sameness that we see in different races of a different colour. I suppose it is the suffering and strain, common to them all, which gives them this one-ness of look, the same strain, the same relief, the same apathy, the same unquestioning collapse into the hands of the medicine men.”
Lightly Wounded at a Menin Road Dressing Station.