Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/46



We walked silently towards the Boulevard de la Liberté, where Brand's little crowd had established their headquarters.

"Perhaps they're right," he said presently. "Perhaps the hatred is divine I may be weakening, because of all the horror."

Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen him—long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and the Bois Français in No Man's Land. The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw, not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin, and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the Colonel about him.

"Who is that fellow—like a Norman knight?"

The Colonel of the King's Royal Rifles laughed as we went round the next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down.

"Further back than Norman," he said. "He's the primitive man."

He told me that Wickham Brand—a lieutenant then—was a young barrister who had joined the battalion at