"There's a chance of his being mental," she said. "He is being watched."
Was he mental before the war took him, before the sergeant used to whip
the horses as they got to the jumps, before the sergeant cried out
"Cross your stirrups!"?
It isn't his fault; there are strong and feeble men.
A dairyman's is a gentle job; he could have scraped through life all
right. He sleeps in the afternoon, and stirs and murmurs: "Drop your
reins.... Them 'orses, sergeant! I'm comin', sergeant; don't touch 'im
this time!" And then in a shriller voice, "Don't touch 'im...." Then he
wakes.
Poor mass of nerves.... He nods and smiles every time one looks at him,
frantic to please.
There are men and men. Scutts has eleven wounds, but he doesn't "mind"
the war. God made many brands of men, that is all; one must accept them.
But war finds few excuses; and there are strange minnows in the
fishing-net. Sometimes, looking into the T.B. ward, I think: "It almost
comes to this: one must spit blood or fight...."
"Why don't you refuse?" my friend would say to the dairyman. "Why should
you fight because another man tells you to?"
It isn't so simple as that, is it, dairyman? It isn't even a question
of the immense, vague machinery behind the sergeant, but just the
sergeant himself; it isn't a question of generals or politicians of
great wrongs or fierce beliefs ... but of the bugle which calls you in
the morning and the bugle which puts you to bed at night.
Well, well.... The dairyman is in hospital, and that is the best that he
can hope for.
I read a book once about a prison. They too, the prisoners, sought after
the prison hospital, as one seeks after one's heaven.
It is so puffed up of my friend to think that his and his "movement's"
are the only eyes to see the vision of horror. Why, these others _are_
the vision!
This afternoon I was put at splints again.