That
memory blots out all the tragedy and squalor; they think of their
willing comrades in sacrifice and cannot rest.
I was with a young officer who was probably the most wounded man who
ever came out of France alive. He had lain for months in hospital
between sandbags, never allowed to move, he was so fragile. He had had
great shell-wounds in his legs and stomach; the artery behind his left
ear had been all but severed. When he was at last well enough to be
discharged, the doctors had warned him never to play golf or polo, or
to take any violent form of exercise lest he should do himself a
damage. He had returned to Canada for a rest and was back in London,
trying to get sent over again to the Front.
We had just come out from the Alhambra. Whistles were being blown
shrilly for taxis. London theatre-crowds were slipping cosily through
the muffled darkness--a man and girl, always a man and a girl. They
walked very closely; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly the
contrast flashed across my mind between this bubbling joy of living
and the poignant silence of huddled forms beneath the same starlight,
not a hundred miles away in No Man's Land. He must have been seeing
the same vision and making the same contrast. He pulled on my
arm. "I've got to go back."
"But you've done your 'bit,'" I expostulated. "If you do go back and
don't get hit, you may burst a blood vessel or something, if what the
doctors told you is true."
He halted me beneath an arc-light.
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