“Mac! Is there any book I could learn this blinking lingo from?”
“Try Ovid—‘Art of Love,’” replied Phineas sleepily.
CHAPTER XIV
The spell of night sentry duty had always been Doggie’s black hour. To most of the other military routine he had grown hardened or deadened. In the depths of his heart he hated the life as much as ever. He had schooled himself to go through it with the dull fatalism of a convict. It was no use railing at inexorable laws, irremediable conditions. The only alternative to the acceptance of his position was military punishment, which was far worse—to say nothing of the outrage to his pride. It was pride that kept the little ironical smile on his lips while his nerves were almost breaking with strain. The first time he came under fire he was physically sick—not from fear, for he stood it better than most, keeping an eye on his captain, whose function it was to show an unconcerned face—but from sheer nervous reaction against the hideous noise, the stench, the ghastly upheaval of the earth, the sight of mangled men. When the bombardment was over, if he had been alone, he would have sat down and cried. Never had he grown accustomed to the foulness of the trenches. The sounder his physical condition, the more did his delicately trained senses revolt. It was only when fierce animal cravings dulled these senses that he could throw himself down anywhere and sleep, that he could swallow anything in the way of food or drink. The rats nearly drove him crazy…. Yet, what had once been to him a torture, the indecent, nerve-rasping publicity of the soldier’s life, had now become a compensation. It was not so much in companionship, like his friendly intercourse with Phineas and Mo, that he found an anodyne, but in the consciousness of being magnetically affected by the crowd of his fellows. They offered him protection against himself. Whatever pangs of self-pity he felt, whatever wan little pleadings for the bit of fine porcelain compelled to a rough usage which vessels of coarser clay could disregard came lingeringly into his mind, he dared not express them to a living soul around. On the contrary, he set himself assiduously to cultivate the earthenware habit of spirit; not to feel, not to think, only to endure. To a humorously incredulous Jeanne he proclaimed himself abruti. Finally, the ceaseless grind of the military machine left him little time to think.
But in the solitary sleepless hours of sentry duty there was nothing to do but think; nothing wherewith to while away the time but an orgy of introspection. First came the almost paralysing sense of responsibility. He must keep, not only awake, but alert to the slightest sound, the slightest movement. Lives of men depended on his vigilance. A man can’t screw himself up to this beautifully emotional pitch for very long and be an efficient sentry. If he did, he would challenge mice and shoot at cloud-shadows and bring the deuce of a commotion about his ears. And this Doggie, who did not lack ordinary intelligence, realized. So he strove to think of other things. And the other things all focussed down upon his Doggie self. And he never knew what to make of his Doggie self at all. For he would curse the things that he once loved as being the cause of his inexpiable shame, and at the same time yearn for them with an agony of longing.
And he would force himself to think of Peggy and her unswerving loyalty. Of her weekly parcel of dainty food, which had arrived that morning. Of the joy of Phineas and the disappointment of the unsophisticated Mo over the pâté de foie gras. But his mind wandered back to his Doggie self and its humiliations and its needs and its yearnings. He welcomed enemy flares and star-shells and excursions and alarms. They kept him from thinking, enabled him to pass the time. But in the dead, lonely, silent dark, the hours were like centuries. He dreaded them.
To-night they fled like minutes. It was a pitch-black night, spitting fine rain. It was one of Doggie’s private grievances that it invariably rained when he was on sentry duty. One of Heaven’s little ways of strafing him for Doggieism. But to-night he did not heed it. Often the passage of transport had been a distraction for which he had longed and which, when it came, was warmly welcome. But to-night, during his spell, the roadway of the village was as still as death, and he loved the stillness and the blackness. Once he had welcomed familiar approaching steps. Now he resented them.
“Who goes there?”