PLAY OUT THE GAME
Kentucky thought often over the Battle Hymn in the long waking hours
of pain and the listless time of convalescence, and since his thoughts
came in time to crystallize into words and words are easier to set down
than thoughts, here is a talk that he had, many weeks after, when he
was almost well again--or rather as well as he would ever be.
The talk was with Larry, with the broken wreck of a Larry who would
never, as the doctors told him, walk or stand upright again. Kentucky
had finished his convalescing at Larry’s home, and the talk came one
night when they were alone together in the big dining-room, Larry,
thin-faced and claw-handed, on a couch before the fire, Kentucky in
a deep armchair. They had chatted idly and in broken snatches of old
days, and of those last desperate days in “the Push,” and on a chance
mention of Pug both had fallen silent for a space.
“Poor Pug,” said Larry at last. “Did it ever strike you, Kentuck, what
a queer quartette of chums we were, Billy Simson and Pug and you and
me?”
“Yes, mighty queer, come to think of it,” agreed Kentucky. “And the
game handed it out pretty rough for the lot of us--Billy and Pug
killed, you like this, and me ...” and he had lifted the stump of a
hand bound about with black silk bandages and showing nothing but a
thumb and the stump of a finger. “And I figure that out of the lot
yours is maybe the worst.”
“I don’t know,” said Larry slowly. “I’m well enough off, after all,
with a good home and my people asking nothing better than to have the
looking after of me. I always think Billy had the hardest luck to be
hit again just as he was coming out of it all with a safe and cushy
one.”
“Anyway,” said Kentucky, “it’s a sure thing I came out best. I’m
crippled, of course, but I’m not right out of action, and can still
play a little hand in the game.”
“That’s right,” said Larry heartily. “You’re fit enough to tackle the
job in his office in my place that the Pater’s so keen to have you
take--and as I am, selfishly, because the offer carries the condition
that you live with us. I hope you’ve decided to sign on with the firm?”
“I’m going to tell your father to-night,” said Kentucky very slowly.
“But I’m glad to have the chance to tell you first. I asked him to
give me a day to think it over because I wanted to know first if I’d a
good-enough reason for refusing----”
“Refusing,” Larry said, and almost cried the word.
“When I went out this morning,” said Kentucky quietly, “I went to the
Red Cross people and had a talk with Kendrick. I showed him I was fit
enough for the job and he asked me if I’d take an ambulance car to
drive up front.”
Larry stared at him. “Up front again,” he gasped. “Haven’t you had
enough of the front?”
“More than enough,” said Kentucky gravely. “I’m not going because I
like it, any more than I did in the first place. It’s just because I
think I ought to play out the game.”
“God,” said Larry. “As if you hadn’t done enough. You’ve got your
discharge as unfit. Who would ever blame you for not going back, or
dream you ought to go?”
“Only one man,” said Kentucky with the glimmer of a smile, “but one
that counts a smart lot with me; and he’s--myself.”
“But it’s nonsense,” said Larry desperately. “Why, it’s not even as if
you were one of us. After all, you’re American, and this country has
no claim, never had a claim, on you. You’ve done more than your share
already. There isn’t an earthly reason why you should go again.”
“Not even one of us,” repeated Kentucky softly. “Well, now, haven’t I
earned the right to call myself one of you? No, never mind; course I
know you didn’t mean it that way. But you’re wrong otherwise, boy. I’m
not an American now. If you folks went to war with America to-morrow,
and I was fit to fight, I’d have to fight on your side. There was an
oath I took to serve your King, when I enlisted, you’ll remember.”
“No one would expect an oath like that to bind you to fight against
your own people,” said Larry quickly.
“In Kentucky, boy,” said Kentucky gently, his speech running, as it
always did when he was stirred into the slurred, soft “r”-less drawl of
his own South, “an oath is an oath, and a promise is little sho’t of
it. I fought foh yoh country because I thought yoh country was right.
But I come at last to fight foh her, because I’ve got to be proud of
her and of belonging to her. And I want to pay the best bit of respect
I can think of to those men I fought along with. It just pleases me
some to think poor old Pug and Billy and a right smart mo’ we knew
would like it--I’m going to take out naturalization papers just as soon
as I can do it.”
“Like it,” said Larry, with his eyes glistening; “why, yes, I think
they’d like it.”
Kentucky hesitated a little, then went on slowly: “And theh’s some
verses I know that have so’t of come to map out a route fo’ me to
follow. Oveh theh those verses stood right up an’ spoke to me. I’ve
thought it oveh quite a lot since, an’ it’s sure plain to me that I
was made to see how close they fitted to what I could see, an’ heah,
an’ undehstand, just so I could use the otheh verses to show me otheh
things I could not undehstand. I’d like to tell yo’ some of those
verses an’ how they come in.”
He told first the picture he had seen of the German prisoners searching
amongst their own heaped dead, while the British guard stood watching
them, and the sky flickered with “the fateful lightning” and the guns
growled their triumph song; and then went on and repeated the verse of
the Battle Hymn, “Mine eyes have seen----”
“You see just how exact it fitted,” he said. “But it wasn’t only in
that. Theh were otheh lines”; and he went on to tell of the journey
back from the advanced dressing station, the camp fires dotting the
hills, the mists crawling in the valley, the lanterns moving to and fro
where the bearers still searched for the wounded. “Just see how it came
in again,” he said, and repeated another verse:
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps,
I have read His righteous sentence in the dim and flaring lamps,
His truth is marching on.
“That wasn’t all,” he went on. “The words fitted ’most everywheh
they touched. All along I’ve neveh quite managed to get so soaked in
confidence that we must win as every man I’ve met in the British Army
has been. I’ve had some doubts at times; but that night I lost them
all. It wasn’t only seeing the men pouring up into the firing line, an’
the sureness of not being driven back that I could figure was in the
minds of the higher Commands when they set to building roads an’ rails
right up into the captured ground; it wasn’t only the endless stacks
of shells and stuff piled right there on the back doorstep of the
battle, and the swarms of guns we came back through. It was something
that just spoke plain and clear in my ear, ‘He has sounded forth the
trumpet that shall never call retreat,’ an’ I’ve had no shadow of doubt
since but that Germany will go undeh, that theh is nothing left for her
but defeat, that she is to be made to pay to the last bitter squeezing
of the grapes of wrath for the blood and misery she plunged Europe
into. Theh will be no mercy fo’ heh. That was told me plain too--‘I
have read the fiery gospel writ in rows of burnished steel, “As ye deal
with My contemners so with you My soul shall deal.”’ ... Bernhardi an’
all his lot writ a fiery enough gospel, but it’s cold print beside that
other one, that strips the last hope of mercy from His contemners with
their gospel of blood and iron and terror and frightfulness.” He paused
and was silent a little, and then glanced half-shamefacedly from the
flickering fire-shadows at Larry.
“Any one else might think I was talkin’ like a rantin’, crazy, fanatic
preacher,” he said. “But you an’ I, boy, an’ most that’s been oveh
theh, will undehstand, because we’ve learned a lot mo’ than we can
eveh tell or speak out loud.... So I’ve come to believe that all these
things fetched home a plain message to me, an’ I’d do right to follow
the rest of the verses as best I could. ‘As He died to make men holy,
let us die to make men free,’ is straight enough, an’ I’ve got to go on
offering my life as long as He sees fit to let me, or until He sees fit
to take it.”
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat,
O be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant my feet,
Our God is marching on!
He was speaking now slowly and low and musingly, almost as if he spoke
to himself. “My heart has had some sifting too. It was so easy to take
this offeh of yo’ father’s, and live pleasant an’ smooth; an’ it was
nasty to think about that otheh life, an’ the muck and misery of it
all. But altho’ I could be no ways swift or jubilant about it, I came
to allow I’d just go again, an’ do what I could.”
In the silence that followed they heard the quick slam of an outer
door, and a minute later their room door swung open and some one
entered briskly, stopped in the half-dark and cried out in a girl’s
laughing voice, “Why--whatever are you two boys doing in the dark?”
Kentucky had jumped to his feet and was moving round the couch, but
Larry’s sister spoke imperiously. “_Will_ you sit down, Kentuck? How
often have I to tell you that you haven’t quite escaped being an
invalid yet?”
“Why, now, I thought I’d been discharged fit,” said Kentucky, and
Larry called, “Come here, Rose, and see if you can persuade this crazy
fellow.”
Rose came forward into the firelight and made Kentucky sit again, and
dropped to a seat on the floor in front of Larry’s couch. Kentucky sat
back in the shadow looking at her and thinking what a picture she made
with her pretty English face framed in a dark close-fitting hat and a
heavy fur round her throat with the outside damp clinging and sparkling
on it.
“Persuade him,” she said, “what to? Wouldn’t it be easier for me just
to order him?”
“He talks about going back,” said Larry. “Out there--to the front
again.”
The girl sat up wide-eyed. “The front,” she repeated. “But how--I don’t
understand--your hand....”
“Not in the firing line,” said Kentucky quickly, “I’m not fit for that.
But I am fit for Red Cross work.”
“It’s as bad,” said Larry, “if you’re working close up, as I know you’d
be if you had a chance.”
The girl was staring into the flickering fire with set lips. She looked
round suddenly and leaned forward and slipped a hand on to Kentucky’s
knee. “Oh, Ken ... don’t, don’t go. Stay here with us.”
Kentucky’s thought flashed out to “over there,” where he would move
in mud and filth, would be cold and wet and hungry. He saw himself
crawling a car along the shell-holed muddy track, his hands stiff with
cold, the rain beating and driving in his face, the groans of his load
of wounded behind him, the stench of decay and battle in his nostrils,
the fear of God and the whistling bullets and roaring shells cold in
his heart. And against that was this snug, cozy room and all the life
that it stood for ... and the warm touch of the girl’s hand on his
knee. He wavered a moment while a line hammered swiftly through his
mind, “... sifting out the hearts of men....”
Then he spoke quietly, almost casually; but knowing him as they did,
both knew that his words were completely final.
“Why, now,” he said slowly, “Kendrick, my friend Kendrick of the Red
Cross, asked me; and I passed my word, I gave my promise that I’d go.”
Transcribers’ Notes:
Punctuation and hyphenation inconsistencies have been retained.
Simple typographical errors have been corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks have been remedied.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.