Chapter XIV: From Fear to Heroism

A common topic in letters from the front is the feeling of the writers on going into battle. They were "half mad with excitement"; they "did not know what they were doing"; they felt "hot and cold, and, as it were, stuck to the ground." One remarks, "If anyone tells you that he is not afraid in his first battle, you may be sure that he is a liar."

In a ball-room a girl was overheard asking an officer, who has shown himself brave above the average, what he felt when he went into his first engagement. "My dear young lady," he replied, "I felt like making for the nearest hedge that would hide me comfortably."

The South African soldier and statesman, Louis Botha, was asked what it was like to be on a field of battle, and whether men rise to the occasion. "That depends," he said "on the spirit of the man."

Speaking of the science of slaughter, of which the present war has been an exhibition, a soldier remarked: "I don't believe there is a man living who, when first interviewing an 11in. howitzer shell, is not pink with funk. After the first ten, one gets quite used to them, but really, they are terrible!"

When Lord Clive was an ensign, in his first battle he felt almost unable to stand up from fear. Seeing this the captain of his company told him that he used to be that way himself, and then took him by the hand and walked with him where the firing was heaviest. This reassured him, and the great general used to say that no man ever performed a better service for another than this captain did for him.

The bravest soldiers are often the most nervous when they first face an enemy, just as the most eloquent orators are when they begin to speak. This is because men fight and are eloquent by means of nerve power. Each must warm to the work before he gets his nerves under control, and then he astonishes the world, but no one so much as himself.

There is no man so brave as the man who is afraid of being afraid. An officer had a confidential talk a day or two before a battle that was imminent with a subaltern that had just come out. He was delicate looking and nervous. He said that he was a born coward and that he would disgrace himself in his first battle. "I saw him just before the next fight began, looking pitifully white and haggard, and I never saw him again; but I heard that he had fought like a hero, and that he had lost his life in an effort to save one of his men."

"If one did not know you, Colonel," said a subaltern, "one would say you were afraid." "Boy," was the answer, "if you were half as much afraid as I am you would run away."

Shakespeare represents a hero thus speaking to his body before a battle begins:

"Thou tremblest, my poor body, but if thou didst know Where I will bring you before the day is over Thou wouldst tremble much more."

This was related by a sergeant of the York and Lancaster Regiment: "Every soldier knows that the first experience of being under fire is terribly unnerving, and the best of men will admit that at times they are tempted to run away. There was a young lad of the Worcestershire Regiment who had this feeling very badly, but he made up his mind that he would conquer it, and this is what he did. He made it a practice to go out of the trench and expose himself to German fire for a bit every day. The poor boy trembled like a leaf, but his soul was bigger than the weak little body holding it, and he went through the terrible ordeal for a week. On the eighth day he was fatally hit. His last words to me were, 'They can't say I was a coward, can they?'"

On one occasion a subaltern of the Munsters was so little afraid of a fight with the Germans that his only fear was that they would not come on. The regiment was waiting for a night attack, and waited in vain. Hour after hour passed. The men in the trenches who had been warm with excitement began to feel cold again. Yet still no Germans came. At last the subaltern, who had been walking incessantly up and down behind the trenches like a caged lion, could stand it no longer. He glanced anxiously for the twenty-fifth time at his wrist watch and muttered, "I do hope nothing has happened to them!"

A young soldier wrote: "In the first action I went silly and cried for mother ten times, but all of a sudden courage loomed up in me. I thought I could not have enough nerve to stick a man with a bayonet, but during a charge one goes mad."

Much courage is needed to charge with a bayonet, or to face a bayonet charge. Young soldiers sometimes get a sinking sensation when the order to charge is given. It is horrid putting a bayonet into a man, and it is sometimes difficult to get it out of him. "It was his life or mine," said a soldier describing his first battle, "and I ran the bayonet through him. In war mercy is only for the merciful. It is awful killing big, fine men who have done us no harm; but we do it or they will do it to us."

Private G. Glew, of the Coldstream Guards, wrote: "Once I had my bayonet in a German's shoulder, and could not get it out sharp enough to keep an eye on the German that was behind me with his bayonet ready for me, when the captain drew his revolver and shot him, saving my life."

Soldiers do not like to talk about what they feel during a battle, but one man did tell a newspaper interviewer that "the sensation of killing a man is not nice. Once done, however, your blood grows hot, and you seem to see all red. A passion unknown in other moments possesses you. The more of your chums you see knocked down, the madder you seem to fight. One gets a kind of bloodthirsty feeling which it is impossible to quell."

Soldiers are nerved to scorn danger from different motives. The highest motive of all is when the "gallant private" who cannot hope for much professional advancement practises his "heroism obscure" simply from a sense of duty. Sometimes ambition urges him on, nor shall we blame him.

A driver in the artillery wrote in a letter home: "We have got some brave men in the British Army, but I saw more than one kneel down and say his prayers the night before a battle was expected." How strange that this man should think that there is any inconsistency between praying and being courageous! Surely the best way of getting rid of fear is to realise by prayer the presence with us of a Higher Power. In several letters men wrote, after describing some danger that they had to face, "I prayed then as I never did before in my life."

A young officer once told me that there was no service like the Holy Communion for men who had to face death. He said he felt "square" afterwards.

Religion under fire is not apologetic; it is quietly dominant. Shadow, darkness and doubt vanish. "My God" is the call of the heart, and a sincere call.