Page:Aaron's Rod, Lawrence, New York 1922.djvu/140

 So he didn't feel the pain. Well, they carried him in. I always used to like to look after my men. So I went next morning and I found he hadn't been removed to the Clearing Station. I got hold of the doctor and I said, 'Look here! Why hasn't this man been taken to the Clearing Station?' I used to get excited. But after some years they'd got used to me. 'Don't get excited, Herbertson, the man's dying.' 'But,' I said, 'he's just been talking to me as strong as you are.' And he had—he'd talk as strong and well as you or me, then go quiet for a bit. I said I gave him the morphia before he came round from the stunning. So he'd felt nothing. But in two hours he was dead. The doctor says that the shock does it like that sometimes. You can do nothing for them. Nothing vital is injured—and yet the life is broken in them. Nothing can be done—funny thing—Must be something in the brain—"

"It's obviously not the brain," said Lilly. "It's deeper than the brain."

"Deeper," said Herbertson, nodding.

"Funny thing where life is. We had a lieutenant. You know we all buried our own dead. Well, he looked as if he was asleep. Most of the chaps looked like that." Herbertson closed his eyes and laid his face aside, like a man asleep and dead peacefully. "You very rarely see a man dead with any other look on his face—you know the other look.—" And he clenched his teeth with a sudden, momentaneous, ghastly distortion.—"Well, you'd never have known this chap was dead. He had a wound here—in the back of the head—and a bit of blood on his hand—and nothing else, nothing. Well, I said we'd give him a decent burial. He lay there waiting—and they'd wrapped him in a filthy blanket—you know. Well, I said he should have a proper blanket. He'd been dead lying there a day and a half you know. So I went and got a blanket, a beautiful blanket, out of his private kit—his people were Scotch, well-known family—and I got the pins, you know, ready to pin him up properly, for the Scots Guards to bury him. And I thought he'd be stiff, you see. But when I took him by the arms, to lift him on, he sat up. It gave me an awful shock. 'Why he's alive!' I said. But they said he