And so Philpott finally broke his nerve. But he was still keen and
resolute to go on, in spite of the bitterness in his heart.
Philpott--and other things--had still to break his spirit. And the
'other things' were many that winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless
winter. Billets became more and more broken and windowless and lousy;
firewood vanished, and there was little coal. On the high slopes there
was a bitter wind, and men went sick in hundreds--pneumonia, fever,
frost-bite. All dug-outs were damp and chilling and greasy with mud, or
full of the acrid wood-smoke that tortured the eyes. There were night
advances in the snow, where lightly wounded men perished of exposure
before dawn. For a fortnight we lived in tents on a hill-top covered
with snow.
And one day Harry discovered he was lousy....
Then, socially, though it seems a strange thing to say, these were dull
days for Harry. Few people realize how much an infantryman's life is
lightened if he has companions of his own kind--not necessarily of the
same class, though it usually comes to that--but of the same tastes and
education and experience--men who make the same kind of jokes. In the
line it matters little, a man is a man, as the Press will tell you. But
in the evenings, out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with the
Old Crowd and exchange old stories of Gallipoli and Oxford and London;
even to argue with Eustace about the Public Schools; to be with men who
liked the same songs, the same tunes on the gramophone, who did not
always ask for 'My Dixie Bird' or 'The Green Woman' waltz.... And now
there was none of the Old Crowd left, only Harry and myself, Harry with
a company now, and myself very busy at Headquarters. And Harry's company
were very dull men, promoted N.C.O.'s mostly, good fellows all--very
good in the line--but they were not the Old Crowd. Now, instead of those
great evenings we used to have, with the white wine, and the music, and
old George dancing, evenings that have come down in the history of the
battalion as our battles have done, evenings that kept the spirit strong
in the blackest times--there were morose men with wooden faces sitting
silently over some whisky and Battalion Orders....
And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable Hewett. That was the black
heart of it. When a man becomes part of the great machine, he is
generally supposed--I know not why--to surrender with his body his soul
and his affections and all his human tendernesses. But it is not so.
We never talked of Hewett very much. Only there was for ever a great
gap. And sometimes, when we tried to be cheerful in the evenings, as in
the old times, and were not, we said to each other--Harry and I--'I wish
to God that he was here.' Yet for long periods I forgot Hewett. Harry
never forgot him.
Then there was something about which I may be wrong, for Harry never
mentioned it, and I am only guessing from my own opinion. In two years
of war he had won no kind of medal or distinction--except a 'mention' in
despatches, which is about as satisfying as a caraway-seed to a starving
man. In Gallipoli he had done things which in France in modern times
would have earned an easy decoration. But they were scarce in those
days; and in France he had done much dogged and difficult work, and a
few very courageous, but in a military sense perfectly useless things,
nothing dramatic, nothing to catch the eye of the Brigade. I don't know
whether he minded much, but I felt it myself very keenly; for I knew
that he had started with ambitions; and here were fellows with not half
his service, or courage, or capacity, just ordinary men with luck,
ablaze with ribbon.... Any one who says he cares nothing about medals is
a hypocrite, though most of us care very little. But if you believe you
have done well, and not only is there nothing to show for it, but
nothing to show that other people believe it ... you can't help caring.
And then, on top of it, when you have a genuine sense of bitter
injustice, when you know that your own most modest estimate of yourself
is exalted compared with the estimate of the man who commands you--you
begin to have black moods....