Page:War, the Liberator (1918).djvu/17

 guns—ugh! I wasn’t touched except for a hole in my hose-top. I didn’t stop swearing the whole time, except when I was praying—but I’d promised the men that I wouldn’t leave the Boche trench while there was a man alive in it and I kept my word. One poor devil was a Catholic; he started confessing to me, thinking I was a priest—I meanwhile praying, ‘O God, let us get these poor beggars in.’ All the men I have brought in have died.

“I believe I’ve been recommended for the Military Cross, but I’'d rather have the boys’ lives. If I get one, I'll get home on special leave soon. I’ve had my taste of a show. It’s not romantic. It’s hell.”

The British soldier is nothing if not inconsistent. When he’s in the trenches, sharing magnanimously and doing noble things with a will day and night, he likes to pose as a grumbler. One of his chief topics of conversation is the way he’ll “swing the lead” if ever he has the luck to be wounded and get out to Blighty. But when he does get back to Blighty, he isn’t content to stay there. He can’t rest. The heroism of the hell “out there”—a hell that has nothing romantic—shouts to him. It isn’t the fascination of the horror that draws him. It certainly isn’t the love of fighting. I think it is the love of the men he has left behind, the knowledge of what they are enduring and the desire by his little help to afford some tired fellow an hour’s rest. To do that, even though