“A friend of mine, after a ‘scrap,’ saw a proof of this which almost
cost him his life, as he had to resist the tendency to laugh, for he
had been shot through the lungs. A big Scotsman, in a muddy kilt, and
with fixed bayonet, had in his charge a German prisoner, who was very
unwilling to get a move on. And Sandy shouted out to a companion on
ahead, ‘Hey, Jock, he winna steer. What’ll I dae wi’ him?’ But Jock,
busy driving his own man forward, just answered over his shoulder,
‘Bring him wi’ ye.’ Both of these men had the sweat of conflict not dry
upon them. But they never for a moment thought of driving the bayonet
into that reluctant foe, as the German would have done most readily. Of
course, one does occasionally find the old grim warrior still, quite
contented under hard circumstances, finding indeed the conditions a
kind of real relief after the rust of peaceful days.
“This same friend, going one night along the trenches, almost
thigh-deep in mud, came upon a grizzled Irishman, O’Hara, cowering in
the rain. ‘Isn’t this a damnable war, O’Hara?’ said he. ‘Thrue for you,
sir,’ was the unexpected reply. ‘But, sure, isn’t it better than having
no war at all?’
“A campaign like this brings one into touch with strange bedfellows.
A man I know told me, ‘In one place, during the early terrible days,
we crept into a cellar, and I lay down to try to sleep. But I soon
found this to be impossible, for I became aware of somebody that kept
running to and fro in the dark, driving all the rest away. I went out,
and spoke to the doctor, whom I met. “Oh,” he replied, “that’s only
our lunatic.” It was, indeed, a poor fellow who had gone mad in the
retreat; and they could meanwhile do nothing but carry him along with
them.’ Perhaps the weirdest of all the strange mixtures whom I met
out at the front was a young fellow at a mechanical transport camp.
His father was a Russian Jew, his mother was English, his grandfather
Dutch, and he himself was born in London and brought up in Glasgow. In
a world of such widely international disturbance you almost expected
him to go off into effervescence, like a seidlitz powder.
[Illustration:
_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._