“We were a bit cut up that day, but we got our own back with the bayonet.”
“Well, they took our range rather too neatly, but man for man Tommy’s a match for the Hun any day, even if we were short of shells.”
“Poor lads! they had to trot off before they’d had their breakfast--a six-mile walk and stiff work to follow--after three days and three nights of it below Hollebeke. We’d been sent back for a rest when the message came; but the men didn’t mind anything, only the loss of the breakfast. ‘Such a good breakfast as it was, sir,’ as one of them said to me. Six o’clock in the morning and a six-mile march! A few of the fellows clapped their bacon into their pockets. The line was broken and the Germans coming in. Someone had to drive them out, and the Worcesters came handy.”
“Oh yes, we did it all right; running like smoke they were, squealing--they can’t stand the bayonet!”
That was the “little bit” where our soldier got his wound.
His sergeant dressed it first at the back of the firing-line, then he walked into Ypres. He went to the hospital, found it crowded--‘Lots of fellows worse than I was’--so he strolled away and had his hair cut!--“A real good shampoo and a shave, and a bath, and then a jolly good dinner!” And then he proceeded to look up some nice fellows of the Irish Horse. And in the end he went back to the hospital, and they “did him up!”
When one thinks that in peace time, if anyone had accidentally received such a wound, what a fuss there would have been! What a sending for doctors and nurses! what long faces! what lamentations, precautions, and misgivings! It makes one understand better the state of things over there. How splendidly indifferent our manhood has become to suffering! How gloriously cheap it holds life itself!
H. is happily not among those unfortunate brave men who suffer nervous distress from the sights, the scenes, and the strain of warfare, but he has a keen, almost a poetic, sensibility to the romance and tragedy of his experiences.
As he sat, those November days, in one of the deep arm-chairs before the great bricked hearth in the Villino library, a short phrase here and there would give us a picture of some episode which stamped itself upon the memory of the listener.