Chapter III

For Harry was a very sick man. He had endured through all the stages of dysentery, and now lived with that awful legacy of weakness of which I have spoken. And the disease had not wholly left him, but some days he lay faint with excruciating spasms of pain. Slightly built and constitutionally fragile at the beginning, he was now a mere wasted wisp of a man. The flesh seemed to have melted from his face, and when he stood naked on the beach it seemed that the moving of his bones must soon tear holes in the unsubstantial skin. Standing in the trench with the two points of his collar-bone jutting out like promontories above his shirt, and a pale film of dust over his face, he looked like the wan ghost of some forgotten soldier. On the Western Front, where one case of dysentery created a panic among the authorities, and in the most urgent days they have never had to rely on skeletons to fight, he would long since have been bundled off. But in this orgy of disease, no officer could be sent away who was willing to stay and could still totter up the gully. And Harry would not go. When he went to the battalion doctor it was with an airy request for the impotent palliatives then provided for early dysentery, and with no suggestion of the soul-destroying sickness that was upon him. One day he would not come down to the rocks and bathe, so feeble he was. 'I know now,' he said, 'the meaning of that bit in the psalms, "My knees are like water and all my bones are out of joint."' 'Harry,' I said, 'you're not fit to stay here--why not go sick?' At which he smiled weakly, and said that he might be better in a day or two. Pathetic hope! all men had it. And so Hewett and I walked down, a little sadly, alone, marvelling at the boy's courage. For it seemed to us that he wanted to stay and see it through, and if indeed he might recover we could not afford to lose him. So we said no more.

But by degrees I gained a different impression. Harry still opened his mind to Hewett and myself more than to any one else, but it was by no direct speech, rather by the things he did not say, the sentences half finished, the look in his eyes, that the knowledge came--that Harry did want to go away. The romantic impulse had perished long since in that ruined trench; but now even the more mundane zest of doing his duty had lost its savour in the long ordeal of sickness and physical distress. He did want to go sick. He had only to speak a word; and still he would not go. When I knew this, I marvelled at his courage yet more.

For many days I watched him fighting this lonely conflict with himself, a conflict more terrible and exacting than any battle. Sometimes the doctor came and sat under our olive-tree, and some of us spoke jestingly of the universal sickness, and asked him how ill we must be before he would send us home. Harry alone sat silent; it was no joke to him.

'And how do _you_ feel now, Penrose?' said the doctor. 'Are you getting your arrow-root all right?' Harry opened his mouth--but for a moment said nothing. I think it had been in his mind to say what he did feel, but he only murmured, 'All right, thank you, doctor.' The doctor looked at him queerly. He knew well enough, but it was his task to keep men on the Peninsula, not to send them away.

Once I spent an afternoon in one of the hospital ships in the bay: when I came back and told them of the cool wards and pleasant nurses, and all the peace and cleanliness and comfort that was there, I caught Harry's wistful gaze upon me, and I stopped. It was well enough for the rest of us in comparative health to imagine luxuriously those unattainable amenities. None of us were ill enough then to go sick if we wished it. Harry was. And I knew that such talk must be an intolerable temptation.

Then one day, on his way up to the line with a working-party, he nearly fainted. 'I felt it coming on,' he told me, 'in a block. I thought to myself, "This is the end of it all for me, anyhow." I actually did go off for a moment, I think, and then some one pushed me from behind--and as we moved on it wore off again. I did swear----' Harry stopped, realizing the confession he had made. I tried to feel for myself the awful bitterness of that awakening in the stifling trench, shuffling uphill with the flies.... But he had told me now everything I had only guessed before, and once more I urged him to go sick and have done with it.

'I would,' he said, 'only I'm not sure ... I know I'm jolly ill, and not fit for a thing ... but I'm not sure if it's only that ... I was pretty brave when I got here, I think' (I nodded), 'and I think I am still ... but last time we were in the line I found I didn't like looking over the top nearly so much ... so I want to be sure that I'm quite all right ... in that way ... before I go sick.... Besides, you know what everybody says....'

'Nobody could say anything about you,' I told him; 'one's only got to look at you to see that you've got one foot in the grave.' 'Well, we go up again to-morrow,' he said, 'and if I'm not better after that, I'll think about it again.'

I had to be content with that, though I was not content. For my fears were fulfilled, since in the grip of this sickness he had begun at last to be doubtful of his own courage.

But that night Burnett went to the doctor and said that he was too ill to go on. So far as the rest of us knew, he had never had anything but the inevitable preliminary attack of dysentery, though it is only fair to say that most of us were so wrapped up in the exquisite contemplation of our own sufferings, that we had little time to study the condition of others. The doctor, however, had no doubts about Burnett; he sent him back to us with a flea in his ear and a dose of chlorodyne. The story leaked out quickly, and there was much comment adverse to Burnett. When Harry heard it, he led me away to his dug-out. It was an evening of heavy calm, like the inside of a cathedral. Only a few mules circling dustily at exercise in the velvet gloom, and the distant glimmer of the Scotsmen's fires, made any stir of movement. The men had gone early to their blankets, and now sang softly their most sentimental songs, reserved always for the night before another journey to the line. They sang them in a low croon of ecstatic melancholy, marvellously in tune with the purple hush of the evening. For all its aching regret it was a sound full of hope and gentle resolution. Harry whispered to me, 'You heard about Burnett? Thank God, nobody can say those things about me! I'm not going off this Peninsula till I'm pushed off.'

I said nothing. It was a heroic sentiment, and this was the heroic hour. It is what men say in the morning that matters....

In the morning we moved off as the sun came up. There had been heavy firing nearly all night, and over Achi Baba in the cloudless sky there hung a portent. It was as though some giant had been blowing smoke-rings, and with inhuman dexterity had twined and laced these rings together, without any of them losing their perfection of form.... As the sun came up these cloud-rings stood out a rosy pink against the blue distance, and while we marched through the sleeping camps turned gently through dull gold to pale pearl. I have never known what made this marvel, a few clouds forgotten by the wind, or the smoke of the night's battle; but I marched with my eyes upon it all the stumbling way to Achi Baba. And when I found Harry at a halt, he, too, was gazing at the wonder with all his men. 'It's an omen,' he said.

'Good or bad?'

'Good,' he said.

I have never understood omens; I suppose they are good or bad according to the mind of the man who sees them: and I was glad that Harry thought it was good.